Verizon strives to automate fiber patch panels

Vendors take aim at the last manual central office task

Verizon Business is testing various ways to remotely reconfigure patch panels--the thousands of short fiber connections between transport, switching and outside plant equipment in every central office. And a small group of innovative equipment vendors are offering a range of options for doing just that.

“Patch panels today are the last manual thing we have in the network,” said Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone and network technologies for Verizon Business. “Everything else is remotely configurable.”

Verizon is investigating at least three different technological approaches to automating patch panels. One is based on microelectric mechanical systems, or MEMS, the tiny tilting mirrors that were proposed for all-optical core switching at the turn of the century and have since been repurposed by at least one vendor in particular, Calient Networks. Another approach is a robotic arm that does essentially what human arms do now: unplug fibers and plug them back in somewhere else. A third approach is a fast, free-space optical switch that also uses tiny mirrors to direct light but is based on piezoelectrics--the energy generated by certain materials in response to stress.

Verizon has examined gear from Calient Networks, Fiberzone, Polatis and Glimmerglass, though there are a few other vendors that have promised their own new products soon to come. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, Wellbrock said. Calient’s is based on the most mature technology. Polatis’ piezoelectrics may be the fastest and even the most robust but has limited scale. The robotic arm most closely mimics how patch panels are changed today and is therefore perhaps the most popular with network operations employees.

Verizon tested Calient’s gear in Florida last summer after lightning caused an outage. Two men, driving out to fix the resulting fiber break, had the network back up and running in four hours. Trying the same repair again with Calient’s gear, it took 30 minutes, Wellbrock said. “Eight man hours versus 30 minutes. The guy running [the test] said, ‘I could have done this from my living room, while it’s lightning and raining outside.’”

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