Telcordia and Ciena invest in Ethernet OSS

Telcordia Technologies and next-generation service creation company Ciena, said this week they have co-invested in the development of capabilities to help service providers deliver Ethernet and other services over their existing network infrastructures.

Through a Telcordia program called Generic Feature Development Services (GFDS,) the companies invested money and development time in establishing OSS capabilities for Ciena’s CN 2600 Multiservice Edge Aggregator product that the companies could bring to market simultaneously.

"We’re moving away from the old model where technology was available but the OSS support would lag," said Dennis Tinley, senior vice president of OSS solutions at Telcordia.

Although designed to support all future services, initial capabilities produced by the collaboration are in support of Ethernet and include Sonet virtual concatenation, link capacity adjustment schemes and split routing.

"The ultimate goal is an OSS infrastructure that will support a variety of data services with Ethernet being the first," Tinsley said.

Getting its equipment involved in Telcordia Technologies’ OSMINE process earlier in the development process helps Ciena ensure it has the necessary support from the OSS systems already running in carrier networks, such has TIRKS, NMA and WFA, when its equipment is deployed.

"We have been under tremendous pressure from customers that want to deploy Ethernet services to get this done quickly. So this approach was quite attractive from that perspective," said Tom Mock, vice president of strategic planning for Ciena.

The technology developed through the collaboration is extensible to other Ciena products. However, Ciena focused on the CN 2600 because of the demand for Ethernet services and the traction the equipment is seeing in the carrier market, Mock said.

The software capabilities will allow Ciena to add both low-speed connectivity such as DS1s and high-speed capabilities such as 10/100 Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet. They span the major business functions such as provisioning, activation, service assurance, workforce management and dispatch.

Mock said that rather than creating new ground-breaking technology, the development work was focused on taking a different approach to the process of product development to make sure Ciena’s products have adequate support form network managements out of the box.

For Telcordia, the process also is designed to make the OSMINE process more timely and not come at the end of a product’s development cycle.

The two companies announced their plans to collaborate last October. Since then Ciena has deployed its CN 2600 Multiservice Edge Aggregator at China Unicom, Progress Telecom; SingTel, THUS, Cox and the University of Miami. Ciena also deployed it at an unnamed RBOC.