Salira Tackles Legacy Service/Migration Path Issues with EPON

Startup Salira Optical Network Systems Inc. (www.salira.com), in a departure from many other suppliers’ strategies, has unveiled a “fiber-to-the-business” Ethernet PON (passive optical network) architecture as the foundation for products it plans to bring to market this summer.

While several ATM-based PONs targeted to homes and businesses have been in the market for two to three years and a handful of other startups are bringing Ethernet PONs to market with a residential market orientation, Salira believes it has brought the refinements needed to make EPON an option for the real-world business services environment of incumbent as well as competitive carriers. This means the access network must provide uncompromising support for TDM services in native modes apart from Ethernet as well as put the Ethernet transport component to use in meeting all the requirements of a carrier-class service now and into the future, says Tom Walsh, vice president of sales and marketing for Salira.

“We’re not encapsulating TDM in Ethernet or doing circuit emulation; we’re delivering TDM optically over a dedicated bandwidth path in constant bit frames, all with the same timing that’s used in the framing on voice circuits, frame relay or ATM,” Walsh says. “It’s all configured in accord with the end users’ needs for TDM services.”

Salira’s approach to enabling TDM over the EPON system reflects a product development strategy that’s oriented to the latest wrinkles in the volatile carrier market, where startup vendors looking for traction can no longer rely on selling products that are optimized for greenfield network deployments. Optimizing an access platform for incumbents requires that carriers be able to retain the physical demarcations between service types that underlie current tariffing models, Walsh notes

“The gee-whiz technologies of the past three years have proved they offer a lot of prowess, but when carriers tried to bolt them into their legacy operations elements, that’s where the economics fell apart,” he says. “There were switching and transport walls of separation operationally that a lot of us didn’t take into account.”

Walsh says Salira will wait until Supercomm to reveal many details of its new product line, including costs and some aspects of the physical topology. But he makes clear that the system is designed to operate from either a central office or a node on a SONET ring using proprietary access operations software to support seamless interconnection with all the types of services that a carrier presently delivers from those points of presence. The optical feed between the PoP and the splitter operates at 1.25gbps in each direction, with future plans calling for scaling capabilities to10gbps. The number of end user optical termination points connected from the splitter can be anywhere from two to sixteen.

Along with identifying and provisioning native TDM at the optical interfaces, the system also reacts in real time to the packet traffic patterns to meet dynamic shifts in end user requirements, Walsh says. This means that the service provider can go beyond simply setting lower and upper bandwidth limits to accommodate bursty traffic within any given class of service to enabling true bandwidth-on-demand provisioning in accord with class-of-service policies. The intelligence packed into the system end points also accommodates firewall protection and other security parameters of each individual user, Walsh adds.

The use of Ethernet as a bridge to next generation services with the power to deliver all the quality of service and other provisioning capabilities required of carrier class services has been gaining credibility among carrier strategists. Salira hopes that being able to support this vision at the access side of the network without causing any disruption to the legacy service environment will prove to be the decisive factor in swinging carriers to the Ethernet roadmap.

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