Harmonic expands its scope >BY SHIRA McCARTHY, Associate Editor-News

Harmonic Lightwaves plans to move beyond its traditional market-analog optical transmission-into the digital arena.

Delivering digital services over broadband networks is a tricky business for carriers, said John Dahlquist, vice president of marketing for Harmonic Lightwaves.

"They need large distributed servers with a lot of storage capacity, a way to take programs from the server and put them into a transport data stream, somewhere to multiplex all of these things, encode other signals into the stream and send it out," he said in explaining this week's announcement. "Then they have to modulate the digital signal to a frequency not being used for analog, then demodulate it at the home.

Harmonic will develop digital transport and headend products and will leave the set-top box market alone. Products will be available in the second half of 1997.

As part of its new focus, Harmonic will expand its digital research facility in Haifa, Israel, which was established in 1994. The Israeli facility has received about one-third of Harmonic's R&D funds the last few years, Dahlquist said.

Separately, Harmonic last week introduced an upgraded version of its NETWatch element management system for broadband networks. Harmonic has introduced simple network management protocol compatibility to its NETWatch HEM 5000 software, integrating transport layer monitoring with higher-level network management systems.