Verizon OIF demo highlights service over diverse networks

This week’s Optical Interworking Forum global demonstration shows the telecom industry is one step closer to enabling the provisioning of bandwidth-on-demand across multiple carriers, which in turn enables faster delivery of new bandwidth to global enterprise customers.

In tomorrow’s demonstration at Verizon’s Waltham Labs, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will show off its work with six other global carriers -- China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT), Orange Labs - France Telecom Group (NYSE: FTE), KDDI (OTC:KDDIF) R&D Labs, NTT (NYSE: NTT) and Telecom Italia (OTC: TIAOF.PK) and 10 vendors to do multi-domain restoration of Ethernet service using external network-to-network interfaces (ENNIs).

This kind of restoration is important, said Stu Elby, vice president of network architecture for Verizon, because it shows that network operators can offer end-to-end restoration of service to their global multinational customers even when the service is delivered over multiple vendors’ equipment or over another operator’s network.

“We don’t go every place – no carrier on the map has facilities in every part of the globe, so we all have to depend on using other networks,” Elby said. “For example, Verizon doesn’t have facilities everyplace into Western China, but we have customers who want to connect in Western China, so we have to have facilities or connections into that region, and the same is true for China Telecom for its customers in New York. The reality of the global marketplace is that you can never serve all your customers’ traffic on your network, so you have to partner.”

The OIF added multi-domain restoration capability into the control plane and data plane technologies using Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) services over diverse transport technologies, a function that even helps network operators such as Verizon handle internal connections.

“Adding multi-domain restoration capability into the control plane using ENNIs enables you to restore an extension after a failure,” said Lyndon Ong, a Ciena executive who is the Technical Committee Chair for the OIF. “Using an ENNI allows you to restore connections across multiple domains, which extends the reliability of the connection. We can re-route across failures at a network-to-network interface boundary or across different domains.”

The seven service provider test sites are linked by virtual or real ENNI connections to create the global test network, and during the test, the seven carriers can access network resources within the other carrier networks to test the compatibility of the equipment from multiple vendors within their networks.

The participating vendors are: Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, Marben Products, NEC of America, Nokia Siemens Networks, Sycamore Networks, Tellabs and ZTE Corporation.
Tokyo hosted the first live demonstration of the new capabilities on June 11, and a third demonstration will be held at IIR Telecoms WDM & Next Generation Optical Networking on June 25 in Nice, France.

Verizon also is able to demonstrate setting up an Ethernet VPL over different types of transport networks within its network, Elby said. “Our network has many domains, each with different technology. This shows we can have a common EVPL service independent of the underlying transport independently set up.”

That enables Verizon to deliver bandwidth-on-demand as well, to meet the growing bandwidth requirements of its customers, Elby said, regardless of whether the transport layer uses packet transport technologies, next generation-TDM or both wavelength and TDM transport.