Eye on optics: Photonic routers coming of age with solutions from NEC, Lucent

NEC America is gearing up for the demand in optical backbone equipment. At Networld + Interop, the company previewed the newest member of its SpectralWave optical networking product line. The new product is part of NEC's "Photonic Internetworking Solutions" vision to integrate IP, ATM and frame relay over optical networks.

"Service providers now have to manage on a per-service basis," said Dave Broecker, vice president of marketing at NEC. In the future, providers "want integrated services. A key aspect of that is to have them on a single, open switched core network," he said.

The unnamed photonic router will provide 160 to 320 Gb/s transport capacity and 64 to 128 wave division multiplexing channels. It will support OC-48, OC-192, STM-16 and STM-64 signals and can transport signals up to 600 kilometers without regeneration. The device also will support remote optical add/drop multiplexing on a per-wavelength basis. The system will be unveiled at Supercomm.

The photonic router will provide optical routing and optical path management for ATM- and IP-based services, including packet-over-lambda services, Broecker said. It can be deployed in a point-to-point, ring or mesh environment and will use virtual channels to provide services to the customer.

The NEC device sounds similar to Lucent Technologies' WaveStar LambdaRouter optical cross-connect. Both devices will enable end-to-end managed services.

The Lucent device supports mesh networking in an optical environment. It can support any protocol or bit rate and requires no optical-electrical-optical conversion. The LambdaRouter will scale to support 256 channels and will provide 40 Gb/s per wavelength. It will support IP over photons and will enable services such as voice over IP.

The LambdaRouter will be demonstrated at Supercomm, said Kathy Szelag, vice president of marketing at Lucent.