Ciena takes a ride downtown

Ciena Corp., the apparent market juggernaut for dense wave division multiplexing solutions, announced it will aim DWDM at metropolitan markets to satisfy short-haul, high-capacity applications.

The company will launch MultiWave Firefly, for point-to-point applications, and MultiWave Metro, for metropolitan area network (MAN) ring-based applications, at the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference '97 next week in San Diego. Firefly will be commercially available at the end of this year, and Metro will be available during the second half of 1998, according to Ciena.

Although local carriers have deployed much fiber and Sonet equipment recently, applications have not forced them to pursue capacity-enhancing solutions until now. Also, technologies such as DWDM previously have been too expensive to invest in for short-haul use.

However, as many vendors enter the DWDM market, prices have begun to drop, just as emerging competition in the local exchange environment has boosted the number, variety and complexity of applications.

Firefly and Metro are two among many products that likely will emerge to target the short-haul market over the next several months. Pirelli plans to launch a short-haul product, said company President Walter Alessandrini. Similar announcements are expected at NFOEC '97.

"DWDM can be economical at lower speeds and over shorter distances," said John Ryan, principal at Ryan Hankin Kent, San Jose.

A key factor is that optical amplifiers are not as necessary for such applications as they are in prevalent long-distance DWDM applications. Firefly works for point-to-point applications up to 65 km and multiplexes up to 24 discrete channels at 2.5 Gb/s over one fiber pair. It also interfaces directly with Sonet, asynchronous transfer mode or Internet protocol equipment, reducing the cost usually associated with using Sonet multiplexers for these interfaces, said a spokesman for Ciena.

Metro, a 16-wavelength system, will target local loop and interoffice MAN rings and will be able to aggregate multiple types of traffic.