Cambrian times entry into DWDM fray

A new vendor will emerge at this week's National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference '97 to ply its expertise and scope out business opportunities in the area of dense wave division multiplexing.

Canada's Cambrian Systems, an affiliate of Newbridge Networks, is less than a year old but will target the nascent market for DWDM deployment in metropolitan area networks (MANs) with its new OPTera product family.

The photonic networking solution will harness 32 wavelengths at 2.5 Gb/s each, for total bandwidth up to 80 Gb/s, said Don Smith, president of Cambrian. The company is trying to bridge the gap between DWDM physical layer transport and photonic networking with a protocol and bit-rate independent solution, he said.

"Looking at WDM within the scope of photonic networking is a high-ground approach that simplifies network management," said Smith. Photonic layer restoration and maintenance on a per-wave basis will save carriers the complexity of mapping to Sonet to get switching protection, he said.

A ring-based MAN approach also does not require optical amplifiers, further cutting deployment costs. Simplification and cost reduction are critical to deploying DWDM for short-haul applications, according to one source at consultancy Ryan Hankin Kent.

OPTera also will have a Dark Wavelength capability that will let carriers use dark fiber for multipath maintenance or to resell wavelength capacity to other carriers, said Smith.

Cambrian is scheduling customer trials of OPTera for the first half of 1998. It is one of several companies targeting local area network and MAN applications for WDM (see story).