Sensing evaporating revenues in the long-haul transport market, optical networking companies have begun training their sights on the metropolitan core.
Accordingly, this year's NetWorld+Interop conference played host to several product rollouts in the optical-to-metro market.
On the N+I showroom floor, Broadwing Communications, in Cincinnati, announced that it had begun beta trials of a nationwide all-optical network. According to Jim Morris, Broadwing's director of product marketing, the network will offer "one-stop shopping" to customers who need both long-haul and last-mile access.
Meanwhile, Nortel Networks, widely considered to be a leader in optical technology, announced 10GB optical Ethernet support for its Passport 8600 routing switch. "You can take Gigabit Ethernet coming in from enterprises, aggregate it through a switch, and hand it off as Ethernet end-to-end throughout the entire network," explained Gary Southwell, director of technical marketing at Nortel. "You turn 10GB into a wavelength, and you can fit 160 wavelengths on a single fiber." Trials of the technology are available now, with a final version expected by the end of the year.
The demand for optical services in metro areas is "huge," according to users such as Troy Keali'i Lau, sales manager at Cogent Communications, a Washington-based ISP that uses Cisco's optical equipment to deliver bandwidth to metro areas. "Now that people have bandwidth, they're looking to run all kinds of applications like voice, video, and storage networking," he said.
Irvine, Calif.-based network consulting firm Callisma is another Cisco partner. Bernadette Geuy, a manager at Callisma, added that other drivers for fiber in the metro include content networking and disaster recovery.
Carl Showalter, vice president of marketing at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper Networks, believes one of the biggest pressures within the metro is residents putting more and more bits across the network. "And in enterprises, people are getting higher and higher access. They're putting more demand on concentrated geographical areas," he said.
In a keynote address, Cisco's vice president of enterprise business, James Richardson, said that providing optical services to metro regions will be a key focus for the company. But he also expressed guarded optimism about the short-term future of fiber in densely populated areas, noting that the networking industry must first "learn how to build metropolitan area networks".
Meanwhile, optical vendors that target the carrier market, such as Sycamore Networks in Chelmsford, Mass., and Juniper Networks, also took aim at the metro core on the N+I floor.
Sycamore rolled out new features for its SN 3000 Optical Access Switch to let service providers streamline their operations in metropolitan regions. The enhancements include support for 14 OC-48 connections and software upgrades to provide customized services, such as bandwidth on demand. According to John Galloway, marketing manager of Sycamore's optical access division, these upgrades "add intelligence to the metropolitan network that let carriers provision services more quickly."
Juniper did not release any new products at N+I, but company officials revealed the company's strategy for serving the metro core. "As metro networks evolve, our concern is how we facilitate relieving bottlenecks," Juniper Networks' Showalter said. "In the metro, you have the same kinds of challenges as in long-haul networks, only in a smaller geographic region."
San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco used N+I to showcase its recently announced ONS 15440 platform, a DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) device that pushes optical data into metropolitan regions.
