A giant leap for GigE

Bell Atlantic will announce this week that it has signed a three-year deal with partners ADVA Optical Networking and Inrange Technologies to roll out transparent wavelength services for high-speed applications, including gigabit Ethernet, to metropolitan enterprise customers.

Using ADVA's Fiber Service Platform-II, the RBOC can offer high-speed data, voice and video applications, including disaster recovery, data archiving and mirroring, clustering of computers for parallel processing and gigabit Ethernet services. Inrange will provide the storage area networking equipment, and ADVA will provide its metro dense wave division multiplexing system.

"Sonet is too expensive and doesn't support these services," said Brian McCann, chief sales and marketing officer for ADVA, referring to Sonet's inability to achieve zero loss for disaster recovery and data archiving. "The Internet is driving Sonet over the edge. Many carriers with fiber need a way to provide services without putting it up on their Sonet backbone."

Bell Atlantic will become the first RBOC to provide corporate customers with gigabit Ethernet connections between campuses, McCann said.

"Disaster recovery is an established and growing business," he said. "But gigabit Ethernet is something new that service providers have to be able to offer because corporate needs are exploding. A T-3 connection between sites isn't going to work anymore."