Polatis’ new 80-by-80 optical switch an answer to telcos

Polatis today introduced a scaled-up version of its fast, compact optical switch that contains 80 input ports and 80 output ports, non-blocking – 2.5 times the capacity of its previous product.

The new 2000 series was created in response to carrier demand for more scale, said Gerald Wesel, who quietly became the new chief executive officer of the nine-year-old equipment vendor in January.

“I wish I had dollar for every time a North American carrier told me, ‘We love your product, but if you can give it to me in a little bigger footprint, that would be great,’” Wesel said.

In fact, when evaluating Polatis’ previous product along with other technologies a year ago, Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone and network technologies for Verizon Business, told Telephony that Polatis’ switch was faster than competing gear and very robust but too limited in scale.

Polatis uses piezoelectrics -- the energy generated by certain materials in response to stress – to build very compact, very fast free-space optical switches. Essentially, light in these devices is switched by applying electrical current to small ceramic rods, whose movement tilts lenses and aims lasers toward receiving lenses across a small expanse of open air.

Because the moving parts are powered at basically a molecular level, the switch can be very compact (each 2000 is a four-rack-unit, 19-inch box) and very fast.

“We can switch between fibers in less than 10 milliseconds,” said Nick Parsons, Polatis’ vice president of engineering. “We can switch inside the thresholds for triggering higher level alarms for Sonet. That means you can protect against a failed route without having a noticeable interruption to the service running in that route. You’ll trigger some retransmission, but you won’t trigger the higher level ones which tear down the whole connection.”