Start-up Ocular Networks, which recently raised $30 million in funding, says it holds the key to solving a fundamental problem in bandwidth services: the provisioning of a T-1 line.
Last week at the Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim, Calif., the company announced its first product, the OSX 6000. At first glance, it looks like many of the other switches in the crowded, multiservice provisioning market. Such switches can aggregate wide ranges of traffic, including traffic forms such as time-division multiplexer, IP and ATM. But Ocular claims its OSX can handle all these formats with a single switch fabric that will simplify the provisioning process for service providers, enabling carriers to more quickly offer T-1 (1.5M bit/sec) circuits to customers.
The product operates as a cross-connect that can groom traffic at the T-1 level. Ocular says the OSX 6000 takes advantage of its single fabric to pack thousands of T-1s into a single telephone company’s shelf. This makes it ideal for deployments closer to end-users, where circuits can be provisioned much more quickly.
This is great news for corporate end-users, who are still ordering T-1s in droves. The OSX should cut provisioning times down to a matter of hours as opposed to the weeks it typically takes for carriers to set up service to corporate customers.
The OSX 6000 can handle over 9,000 V 1.5s (this is the equivalent of a T-1) in a single shelf, says Doug Green, Ocular's vice president of marketing. Compare this to Cisco and Redback Networks, whose edge switches each handle 672 T-1 circuits, and Ciena, which supports 1,344 T-1 connections through its acquisition of Cyras, supposed to have the densest product on the market. On the data side, the OSX in its first release handles 64G bit/sec of capacity. This is in sharp contrast to Cisco’s 15454, which handles about 1.5G bit/sec per switch module.
Although it’s theoretically true that a Redback or a Ciena box could rival the IP switching capacity of the OSX 6000 if all the module slots were filled with switching fabrics, using slots for fabrics would waste valuable ports that could provide service to customers.
By going after existing competitors with a higher-density product, Ocular has a shot at the market, say some analysts.
"[Competitive local exchange carriers] are still finding T-1 provisioning a large and very profitable part of their business," says Scott Clavenna, president of PointEast Research and director of research for Light Reading. "At the same time, they are definitely trying to keep costs down, which means reducing space for equipment so they can save on leasing space in colocation facilities and reducing power consumption."
But Clavenna adds that Ocular -- along with several other start-ups like Appian Communications and Coriolis Networks, which are also going after the edge market -- faces one shortcoming. The young start-ups lack the depth in product offerings that carriers seek. Competitors like Ciena and Sycamore Networks, which can offer metropolitan-area network gear along with core-switching solutions, have the upper hand.
The company claims that it is currently in trials with an interexchange carrier, a CLEC and a cable concern. Full production shipments should begin in the first half of this year.
