Ericsson wins big with AOL

America Online last week signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Ericsson to use the vendor's dense wave division multiplexing equipment to boost bandwidth in the Washington, D.C., area. AOL will deploy the Ericsson Optical Networking Networker DWDM system to build a 140-kilometer ring this summer.

AOL is connecting its data centers in the Washington metro area. It is the first ERION Networker ring, but AOL plans to deploy others in the same metro area, said Roselyn Genin, vice president of optical networks in Ericsson's network operators group. "We are building the systems this month, and [AOL] will probably put live traffic on it in mid-summer," she said.

The Networker supports 16 channels and will scale to 32 channels; it can also support a ring 500 kilometers in circumference. AOL and Ericsson did not disclose how many channels would be used in the initial Washington deployment.

The AOL ring will take advantage of Ericsson's FlexingBus technology, Genin said. It will support Internet protocol traffic directly over the fiber and eliminate the necessity of Sonet time division multiplexing equipment.

"They have a gigabit router they are connecting directly over the ERION system," she said. "The optical protection we have in the FlexingBus protects the physical router and protects any failure between nodes. There is coordinated communication between the source and the fiber system, so the switching time is less than 25 milliseconds, well below the 50 milliseconds required by Bellcore for Sonet rings."

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