Following a new light

Only a year after its formation and just a few months after it publicly announced its intentions, Sycamore Networks introduced the first of its optical networking products and scored a $24.5 million deal with Williams Communications.

Sycamore, which was founded by former Cascade Communications executives Desh Deshpande and Dan Smith, describes its new SN 6000 and SN 8000 intelligent optical transport nodes as products that let carriers provision OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s) private lines and other services off existing Sonet OC-192 (10 Gb/s) backbone rings. Sycamore proposes that carriers create a mesh architecture using its elements instead of creating additional Sonet rings.

"These rings are great for voice traffic, but they're really dysfunctional when it comes to supporting new types of traffic," said Deshpande, chairman of Sycamore.

Sycamore's gear is cost-efficient, takes up only seven feet of space and can be installed and grown incrementally, Deshpande said. The result is what Sycamore believes to be a more economical architecture.

"We inject the OC-48 services intelligently over the waves, so we can essentially connect users directly to the optical layer," said Jeff Kiel, director of marketing for Sycamore. "The vision we have is that carriers will install more line cards as they sell more services."

Williams tested both the SN 6000 and the SN 8000 in its lab and is in the process of deploying the SN 6000 throughout its fiber network as a complement to its dense wavelength division multiplexing-enabled OC-192 backbone (see figure).

"As demand for bandwidth increases and customers want OC-48s, there's a lot less value in Sonet multiplexing technology. We're seeing a demand created for waves," said Wayne Price, director of network architecture for Williams. "Sycamore allows me to connect directly into the installed base using a transponder-based system. We add a shelf, cable it up, and as we need bandwidth we slide transponders in."

The Sycamore boxes also let Williams provision bandwidth seamlessly between its backbone and its metro spurs, Price said.

"The problem we're trying to solve is to provide capacity between any two points on the network," he said.

AT&T and Tele-Communication Inc. are wasting no time putting a management team together that will run the merged operations.

Last week, Gerald DeFrancisco, a 25-year AT&T veteran, was named executive vice president of wireline telephony for AT&T Broadband & Internet. The appointment, effective upon completion of the merger, puts DeFrancisco in charge of the operational end of AT&T's residential local voice service, including its joint venture with Time Warner and potential future cable relationships.

"I'm accountable for all telephony operations," he said.

DeFrancisco takes over a group that at one time had plenty of promise but fizzled with the fortunes of the cable telephony market. This time around, though, things will be different, partially because the technology has improved.

"The technology definitely works. What we are working on is the ability to scale this because we're looking at a large-scale rollout," said DeFrancisco. "And the second piece we're working on is the customers' expectations from telephony in general and specifically from AT&T. '99 is the year of getting it right."

That, however, will not include any rollouts of Internet protocol voice, which DeFrancisco views as "not ready for prime time."