Life in the glass lane

In addition, the show floor will demonstrate elegant cooperation as product interoperability and integrated systems take center stage-not only as a result of the recent flurry of mergers and acquisitions, but also as vendors team together to create solid solution sets for their carrier customers.

In for the long haul The theme in the optical networking arena is bigger and faster for long-haul environments. Vendors are designing products that scale for speed and channel count.

Fujitsu will re-establish itself as a player in the long-distance transport market at Supercomm. In 1992 the company took a hiatus from long-distance transport, but last year Fujitsu introduced its 320 Gb/s DWDM and OC-192 (9.6 Gb/s) Sonet transport systems. The trend will continue this year, said Greg Wortman, senior director of marketing at Fujitsu. "The one area where we will be extremely active is in long-distance," he said. "We're working to re-enter that segment of the market."

The company will show various new capabilities for its long-distance transport solution, Wortman said. Among the new features will be the ability to send a signal 600 kilometers without regeneration, non-zero dispersion-shifted fiber in line amplifiers and OC-192 narrowband optics with in-band forward error correction. A high-density OC-192 regenerator will be on display as well as a tunable laser for OC-192.

"In addition to that, we're going to demo transponders for OC-48 [2.48 Gb/s] and OC-192 in our FlashWave 320 Gb/s system," Wortman said. "Previous to this we've been [involved primarily] in integration of narrowband optics. We're really filling out our full product portfolio in the optical networking arena."

Fujitsu will demonstrate new elements for its FlashWave Metro DWDM products. "The name of the game is to drive the cost out of DWDM," Wortman said. The company will also display a new product for next generation loop transport and a multiservice switch.

Nortel Networks will showcase a multitude of optical networking products, including the OPTera products gained with its acquisition of Cambrian Networks.

"We'll continue to demonstrate our leadership in open optical networking with overall end-to-end optical network [solutions]," said Don Smith, vice president and general manager of Nortel's OPTera Solutions division. The OPTera Metro and LH products will be on display along with "enhancements to those [products]-capabilities we haven't demo'd before," he said.

The OPTera LH platform is designed for next generation Internet protocol-optimized communications. It features optical interfaces for IP, asynchronous transfer mode and Sonet/synchronous digital hierarchy traffic, and aggregates lower bit rate optical traffic to 10 Gb/s per wavelength.

In addition, Nortel will demonstrate its interWAN products, which support Ethernet and ATM traffic directly onto Sonet pipes. The products include the interWAN Ethernet Interface Module for collecting traffic in the local ring, the interWAN Cell Ring for shared bandwidth in a LAN configuration in the local loop, and Gigabit Ethernet for end-to-end WAN connectivity across a backbone network.

On the local transport side, Nortel will announce that its Express products, which currently support OC-3 (155 Mb/s), will extend up to OC-12 (622 Mb/s). Meanwhile, Lucent Technologies is demonstrating its WaveStar OLS 400G and Bandwidth Manager products and will most likely showcase the AllMetro device, a spokesman said.

Vendors + interop Simply offering a product isn't enough, especially in the age of consolidation and internetworking. Recognizing that fact, Hitachi Telecom (USA) Inc. is introducing its interoperability strategy called Freedom, the foundation of which is the company's OC-192 products.

"Our focus at Supercomm is going to be on interoperability and multiservice, multivendor networks," said Pete Westafer, senior manager of marketing communications at Hitachi. "At one point, carriers were looking for a single vendor to provide everything. That seems to be going away, and they want the best [products in a class]. That's the capability we want to offer."

Hitachi will participate in several interoperability demonstrations featuring its AMN 5192 Sonet four-fiber bidirectional line switched ring product, the AMN 6100 DWDM system, and the AMN 7000 optical cross-connect system. Its OC-192 product also will show up in demonstrations with two DWDM partners.

Pirelli Cables and Systems, which teamed with Hitachi for a Frontier implementation, is one such partner. Hitachi's AMN 5192 OC-192 Sonet product will be in Pirelli's booth, sending an OC-192 signal through Pirelli's 128-channel WaveMux DWDM equipment. The two vendors are creating a four-node ring on an OC-48 system and on an OC-192 system.

Hitachi will announce interoperability with a second DWDM vendor and conduct two other interoperability demonstrations. It will co-host an IP interoperability demo with an unnamed vendor of a terabit switch router, which will interface directly to Hitachi's AMN 6100 DWDM system at OC-192 rates. In addition, Hitachi will connect its high-speed Sonet equipment with lower-speed Sonet products from another unnamed partner.

In addition to Pirelli's interoperability demo with Hitachi, the DWDM vendor will demo its 128-channel, 1.28 Tb/s WaveMux system with two other vendors, showing multiprotocol support. Pirelli will link to Fore Systems Inc. to support ATM, and Cisco Systems will provide IP support. The entire system will be set up in a ring configuration, and Pirelli will demonstrate optical restoration.

Service providers need flexibility in WDM systems, said Neal Stoker, director of marketing at Pirelli. "WDM is not all Sonet or IP or ATM. It will be a mixture," he said. "We'll show how protection can be done [in a multiprotocol environment]. We'll break the fiber, and the Sonet will switch as it's supposed to, and we'll show what we do to the IP and ATM [for restoration]."

Carrying on the interoperability theme, Ciena Corp. will focus on the LightWorks Initiative, which was announced in tandem with the acquisitions of Lightera Networks and Omnia Communications. The Omnia acquisition won't be finalized until this summer, so it will be exhibiting independently, but Omnia "will have some products in our booth" for demo purposes, said Denny Bilter, director of marketing with Ciena.

Ciena's full line of MultiWave Metro and Sentry products will be on display. To showcase the LightWorks Initiative, the MultiWave products will integrate with Core Director, Lightera's optical core switch. On the access side, the system will connect with Omnia's AXR 500. The demo will also include a connection to an unnamed Cisco product.

Metro mix On the metro side, companies are declaring that the time is now, and they are demonstrating their products to prove it. Alcatel is showcasing its new 1690 optical add/drop multiplexer. The 1690 is a 16-channel DWDM device with transponders for 100 Mb/s to 2.5 Gb/s interfaces. Initially it will be used in linear applications, but a future version will support optical unidirectional path-switched rings and 32 wavelengths. Designed from the ground up for metro environments, Alcatel states that its device is "half the cost" of competitive devices.

Also in the metro DWDM area, Osicom Technologies Inc. will demonstrate enhanced capabilities for the GigaMux, including new techniques for performance monitoring and the GigaMux Electric Photonic Concentrator multisystem, which addresses the access side of the fiber bus, a spokesman said. The EPC aggregates signals in the 50 to 250 Mb/s range and enables a 2.5 Gb/s, 32-channel metro DWDM system to deliver 512 subdivided channels.

Ericsson Optical Networks will demonstrate the Erion Networker, which provides "optically protected metro ring DWDM solution," company officials said. It features the FlexingBus, and extends ring circumference to more than 500 kilometers, creating what Ericsson calls a "wide area metro" by linking several smaller metropolitan cities. The system also supports ATM and IP directly over DWDM.

ADVA Optical Networking will announce the Fiber Service Platform-II, which will be shown for the first time at Supercomm in the Canoga-Perkins booth. The FSP-II DWDM platform enables managed high-speed data services to enterprises within a metro area. This product solves the problem of fiber exhaust and allows carriers to pack more services on their existing infrastructure. The FSP-II will support eight and 32 wavelengths when it is available to most customers in the third quarter.

Taking a slightly different approach to the metro WDM environment, Optical Networks will highlight its Dynamic Transport System, which integrates three components: OPTX, the optical network operating system; OLMP, the optical link management protocol; and Online, its optical transport hardware.

"We're not just a piece of hardware. Wavelength routed services-this is what we're all about," said Hugh Martin, president and CEO of Optical Networks. The Dynamic Transport System combines the reliability of Sonet with enterprise and end user requirements, he added. The system features bit-rate transparency and has shared protection rings, reducing the amount of fiber consumed strictly for protection.

Switching routes The switch and router market promises to be filled with a host of vendors focusing on multiservice integration, integrated technologies and high-capacity switching fabrics. Carriers' insatiable demand for new services drives the focus on integration.

For example, Cisco Systems' optical internetworking business unit is concentrating on IP over optics. Cisco will share booth space with several "new-world" optical transmission vendors, focusing on IP over DWDM and on IP over intelligent optical networks for metro and WAN applications.

Monterey Networks is unveiling its 20000 series wavelength router, on display for the first time at Supercomm '99. "It's an optical layer device that is providing very intelligent ways of creating bandwidth services, and also provisioning them rapidly," said Michael Zadikian, founder and vice president of marketing at Monterey. "[Within] several seconds a provisioned circuit can be brought up.

The device fits at WDM junctions and supports "hundreds of ports initially, and going on to the thousands in the future," Zadikian said. "It allows carriers to construct a network on a mesh basis, comparable to what they do with routers and ATM switches." The 20000 can scale up to a 160 Tb/s switching capacity and provides 50-millisecond recovery. Routes are determined dynamically.

Closer to the edge, Torrent Networking Technologies will feature the IP9520 Resilient Routing Platform for the Internet edge and a variety of wide area networking interfaces. The company's in-booth demonstration will use IP Multicast to route uncompressed video traffic through IP9520 routers outfitted with ATM, POS, channelized DS-3 (44.74 Mb/s) and 10/100BaseT Ethernet interfaces. In addition, Torrent will showcase its BGP4 implementation via connections to live routers in the Internet.

Newcomer Pluris is showcasing the Terabit Network Router. "It's a scalable IP backbone router that ties into the DWDM structure to offer intelligent IP optical core networking," said Sam Halabi, vice president of marketing for Pluris. The TNR has an optical backplane, with a switching fabric that supports between 90 and 184 Gb/s. The device supports line rates of 10 Gb/s up to 19.2 Tb/s, Halabi said.

Halabi said that today's central offices are crammed with single-box solutions. "Vendors build a box with a limited number of interfaces and [carriers] put another box on when they run out of interfaces. So the central office becomes tens and hundreds of these boxes, and they are managed as single entities," he said.

Pluris sought to address those issues and created the TNR, which aggregates multiple ingress streams from wireless, satellite, cable and local loop sources. The traffic is consolidated for transport over the optical network. It has applications for long-distance carriers, Bell companies, Internet service providers and undersea fiber operators.

Bolstering its carrier offerings, Fore Systems Inc. is highlighting the first phase of carrier-oriented switch enhancements. "We're adding resiliency and redundancy features designed for service providers to the ForeRunner ASX-4000 switch," a spokesman said. The company will announce and demonstrate automatic protection switching features for the ForeRunner ASX-4000 ATM switch. It will also roll out a new series of port cards with enhanced testing features for the ASX family of switches.

Building on a theme, Ascend Communications is showcasing its recently announced GX 250 Multiservice Extender. The GX 250 adds private line and voice capabilities to the GX 500 Multiservice ATM switch. It also offers rapid service provisioning capabilities and eliminates the need for Sonet and digital cross-connect equipment.

Dynarc will be announcing and demonstrating an upgrade in its line of multiservice dynamic synchronous transfer mode-based switches, which currently include the DS 100 and DS 300. The new multiservice switch is designed for metro networks and Internet points of presence. It will support IP services and video and voice transmission. In addition, the switch can run DTM over Sonet.

With the push for faster, more efficient networks, devices that fall into the terabit speeds will also be on display. Nexabit Networks Inc. is showcasing its NX64000 Multi-Terabit Switch/Router, designed for the core network. It features 6.4 Tb/s of switch fabric capacity, supports line interfaces from OC-3 to OC-192 (and will scale further, the company said) and integrates DWDM.

Nortel Networks will highlight the Succession Network, a multivendor IP-evolution solution. The company notes that Succession Network trials currently are underway with SBC Communications and France Telecom, and AT&T. Williams and Focal Communications have endorsed the strategy.

The abundance of high-capacity transport systems and the focus on metropolitan DWDM indicates that we are getting closer to fully optical networking. And the highly competitive market is encouraging-if not forcing-vendors to work together to create fluid solutions. Nothing furthers an industry more than "co-opetition."