In the Spotlight: Adva CTO Christoph Glingener

In January, equipment vendor Adva Optical Networking named Christoph Glingener to the newly created post of chief technology officer. The former head of Siemens’ dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) group, Glingener led the wireless team at Marconi when it was acquired by Ericsson. As Ericsson digested Marconi, Glingener came to Adva a year ago as its vice president of global engineering. Telephony’s Ed Gubbins caught up with him recently.

On technologies Adva is eyeing: In access, definitely things like [passive optical networks (PON)] and managed optical technologies. The biggest question there is how you do stuff like [operations, administration and maintenance (OAM)] and [performance monitoring (PM)] optically. Things like [wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)] PON and WDM access. I’m not talking residential but backhauling, business services and so on. If you do it with wavelengths, you’d look for something like [Ethernet first mile (EFM)] and [connection fault management (CFM)], but optical.

On the optical OAM challenge: If you just look at it from a component technology point of view, it’s no problem to get the filters and components. You may have a cost problem, but the component technologies are all there. The question is how do you do OAM in terms of making sure the link and the service are there. You’ve got two wavelengths going down to one premises, one going to a DSLAM, maybe the other going to a business customer. How do you make sure you can constantly measure it so you know it’s alive and working? Things like you easily have with Ethernet that EFM and CFM provide. Loop back. Performance monitoring. Service assurance. That’s an interesting optical challenge to us.

On Adva’s approach to optical OAM: We’re looking at things we learned from our Ethernet side. In the Ethernet access space, we are strong in demarcation. We look at how we can mirror things we do there with optical technologies. You can do things like sub-carrier multiplexing or sub-carrier modulation. How do you do this physically to get another signal you can monitor but you don’t need access to the bits and bytes like you have in Ethernet? All you have is a wavelength. It’s about how to physically get a sort of tracking down to the [customer premises equipment] from the [central office]. We’re not looking at acquisitions in that space because there’s not much available.

On PONs: I personally think with Ethernet PON (EPON), you always have the bandwidth limitation problem at the end of the day. If you can get the pricing, technology, OAM and PM right, WDM-PON is a transparent technology that fits where we’re coming from with access technologies. I don’t think EPON or [gigabit PON] or [broadband PON] is something for us to look at.

On Provider Backbone Transport (PBT): Within our Ethernet access portfolio, we support PBT today. With our Ethernet access solutions, you can set up PBTs with MAC-in-MAC. We play really at the very head end. We need to be agnostic and transparent to different technologies. We need to support PBT as well as standard [virtual local area network (VLAN)]-based Ethernet and [virtual private LAN service (VPLS)]-based scenarios. We’re not religious about this. If you go more to an IPTV scenario, you may be more VPLS-oriented. If you’re more into Ethernet business services, there are good reasons for PBT with centralized management and provisioning. Both of them have drawbacks. We need to support both.

On G.709, or Optical Transport Networking (OTN): In regional networks, OTN or G.709 gets interesting as a transport technology. We do it today. It may be not so hot in the U.S. currently, but it is in Europe. There were customers of the bigger tier-ones looking at it. I do think some of them do now, so you see it in [requests for proposals]. But it was not that much in focus as it was for Europeans.

On whether he’ll move to the U.S. from Germany, as Adva's chief executive did in 2004: No, I don’t think so. But I spend 30% to 40% of my time in the U.S.