An enterprising move

ADVA Optical Networking is appealing to carriers and their enterprise customers with a new platform that lets carriers offer private, dedicated, ring-based services to a large enterprise customer with multiple locations in a metro area. With Fiber Service Platform, service providers also can offer managed high-speed services.

"It's a carrier-class product geared toward the high-speed data services," said Brian McCann, president of ADVA. The company, focusing on metropolitan environments, particularly mainframe-based data center storage networks, discovered large enterprise customers need to aggregate multiple LAN channels across a fiber infrastructure, which is typically dark fiber leased from the carrier.

The problem is that the LAN data formats must be converted to Sonet for transport, which McCann said is "not efficient" for enterprise communications. If the enterprise wants to upgrade from an OC-3 (155.5 Mb/s) link to OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s), the carrier must upgrade all its points of presence (POPs) on the ring. With FSP, carriers can create a private, redundant ring for the enterprise and upgrade only that ring (see figure).

"You don't need to connect any equipment at the POP, so space and cost requirements at the central office are lowered," McCann said. "You can put a wavelength division multiplexer at the customer [premises] and provide managed high-speed services and point-to-point services." The ring would not connect to the WAN, so the enterprise customer couldn't do multiple drops to other facilities, he added. "But all they need are the high-speed data interfaces."

McCann emphasized that ADVA isn't competing with metro ring WDM companies such as Cambrian Systems (now owned by Nortel Networks). "Our product is for simple point-to-point or point-to-multipoint [environments]," or private rings, he said.

That ADVA knows FSP's boundaries will keep the company on track, said Tim Smith, principal WAN analyst with Dataquest. "It's a logical extension from where [ADVA] has been," he said. "They're not going after the full-fledged WDM infrastructure of the carrier. To do so would be taking on some powerful players in the [dense] WDM space, and that's probably not a wise thing to do."