Light years

Fiber operators discuss their strategies for tackling Supercomm 2000. Most will focus not only on optical access equipment but on multiservice access platforms, network management solutions and, of course, IP

Time is precious, and no one knows that better than Supercomm attendees. The hype of the annual show is matched only by the number of product announcements, demos and personal networking events. Certainly, vendors court service providers to sell them on the latest and greatest, but what do providers really want from Supercomm?

Knowing how providers segment their time and what they look for at the show is critical to manufacturers. This is the show for vendors to, well, show off. But providers have agendas and a keen eye for specific items. The supplier challenge is to attract customers' attention, drawing them out of the crowd and into their booths.

Certainly a service provider's business model influences what companies it visits while at the show. Fiber operators - those providers that build long-haul, metro and in-building networks - are looking for similar technical and product advancements. The top points of interest are wave division multiplexing (WDM) products for metro and long-haul environments.

But fiber providers, particularly those that offer value-added services, carefully monitor progress in other areas such as access devices, switches and routers. Despite the variance in service provider'sbusiness models, all are on the lookout for new technologies, product plans and available devices.

Optic nerve center

Everyone who is anyone is at Supercomm - exhibitors, attendees, buyers, sellers, professional networkers or industry observers. It is the place to see and be seen.

That holds true for fiber operators, which will check out optical technologies - metro, long-haul and ultra long-haul. Supercomm buzzwords will be "all-optical" and "optical access," says Denny Bilter, director of marketing for Ciena. "Twenty-nine new vendors are in the [optical] edge space, and in the core, you've got to go ultra long."

Dense WDM (DWDM), particularly in the metro, will garner much attention at Supercomm, says Jack Biery, executive director of network architecture for Williams Communications. "It's the cost of fiber vs. the cost of DWDM equipment," he says. "We're looking for high wave counts at a low price."

That is a common request, says Kathy Szelag, vice president of marketing for Lucent Technologies. Metro WDM holds appeal for carriers but remains cost-prohibitive for mass deployment. "The technology is too expensive to provide for the metro. The price point, even though it has come down, is still too high to prove in," she says. Szelag expects it to take off in a year or so (Figure 1).

Nevertheless, the metro market will see a lot of innovation, Szelag says. "For the long-distance carrier, the only choice is OC-192 and WDM. That's the only thing that makes economic sense. But a metro carrier can choose from eight or nine dramatically different technologies - from OC-192 or frequency division multiplexing to DSL to ATM switching. There isn't a dominant choice in the marketplace."

One option fiber operators have in building out their networks is to co-build with a partner (see sidebar on page 52).

Several factors are driving metro growth, including metro buildouts, storage area networking and private Internets, says Don Smith, president of Nortel Networks' optical Internet unit. "People want those to occur at more native data rates - gigabit Ethernet is moving to 10 Gb/s Ethernet; Fibre Channel is moving to 2 Gb/s, and it will look a lot like 10 Gb/s Ethernet. It will redefine the edge to metro networks," he says.

That, coupled with e-commerce, fuels Internet growth. Nortel expects bandwidth capacity to grow as much as 200 times in four years, Smith says. "We're going to be continuing the tremendous densities needed to provide more bandwidth overall in the network."

At the same time, carriers want service granularity at wavelength and sub-wavelength levels. "Wavelength services are starting now to become more important as we go forward," Smith says. "What we traditionally thought of as a layer is a service-enabling layer as well as photonic and optical switching [layers]."

Non-traditional fiber solutions also are coming to the forefront. Newcomer AirFiber hopes to pique interest with its OptiMesh wireless optical node, which sits on urban buildings and support 622 Mb/s full duplex transmission. Multiple nodes can link to each other, creating a meshed environment that links to an add/drop multiplexer (ADM) on a fiber ring.

The device is the bridge between the metro network and the customer premises. It links to an ADM and maintains five 9s reliability, even in poor weather, says Jim Dunn, CEO of AirFiber. The company plans to help service providers build wireless, optical mesh networks in metropolitan areas.

The problem with fiber? "It's attached to a small number of [commercial] buildings - 3% to 5% in the U.S. and less than 1% worldwide," Dunn says. The OptiMesh node can be installed on a rooftop to deliver high-speed wireless links where fiber does not exist. "You can convert near-net buildings to on-net buildings," he says.

Going long

The growth in the metro area goes hand-in-hand with the growth in long-haul environments. Metromedia Fiber Network is looking at products in both spaces, says Charlotte Denenberg, vice president of optical networks with MFN. What will she home in on at Supercomm? "Ways of offering our customers more bandwidth - more lambdas or lambdas with more capacity that we can take further without regenerators or amps," she says.

For long-haul networks, Williams' Biery evaluates products based on distance supported without regeneration, the number of channels supported, add/drop capabilities and the number of optical-electrical-optical interfaces in an end-to-end system.

Biery is not alone. All carriers want to go farther with fewer elements, says Greg Wortman, senior director of marketing for Fujitsu Network Communications. "All of them really want to get to cost-effective 100-plus kilometer transport system. They want ultra long-distance without regeneration, and they want to get to a scalable transport architecture that can scale in to the terabit range."

Sounds like a handful of requirements, but Fujitsu's answer is the FlashWave optical ADM, a next generation DWDM platform, Wortman says. At the show, the company will demo a 6.8 Tb/s system that provides 88 channels in the C band and another 80 or so channels in the L band.

"It can scale to 170 channels at 10 Gb/s per channel or less," he says. The same platform will scale beyond 680 channels or will support 40 Gb/s on 170 channels.

The optical ADM can be dynamically reconfigured as a carrier's needs change, and the distance supported without regeneration will double. Driving that capability are advancements in tunable lasers. "Until tunable lasers are out there, it's not economical for carriers to deploy that," Wortman says. At Supercomm, Fujitsu will show its four-channel tunable laser system, which will scale up to 16, 32 and 44 channels by early next year.

Some suppliers suggest that fiber operators will look beyond system densities to management capabilities. Many carriers have purchased high channel-count DWDM systems, but they haven't turned them up because they don't need the bandwidth yet, says Ciena's Bilter. Instead, they need value-added service capabilities.

The WDM market is "cluttered with vendors [that are] caught up in features and benefits," Bilter says. "We've moved on from that. It's time to give [service providers] a tool - something they can put in their networks to offer new optical services. That is going to hit the revenue [stream] and be the differentiator among the carrier community."

Ciena's answer is part of its LightWorks toolkit. The company has outfitted its CoreDirector optical switch with real-time wavelength provisioning software. It automatically determines the best route and can turn up a coast-to-coast circuit quickly, he says.

"It's a dramatic increase in the time to order a high-speed data link or circuit - it cuts it from months to minutes," Bilter says. "Carriers are looking for more than a point-to-point solution. They want to do more than pump up their bandwidth. They want to start offering next generation services off of this [platform]."

Ciena's optical switch and integrated software is in field trials with five major carriers. Bilter expects it will be commercially available around the time of Supercomm.

The assertion that providers need more than wavelengths is backed by Ed Bennett, director of network planning with Extant. The company provides transport over its nationwide backbone to competitive local exchange carriers. Bennett is eyeing long-haul transport mechanisms and their interconnection to metropolitan networks; he sees hybrid qualities in recent optical solutions. Short-haul WDM systems are integrating services or optical switches, and some traditional Sonet transport devices now include ATM or IP switch fabrics, he says.

Bennett wants to find a multiservice node that fits into its packet-based network. This product segment lacks a universal solution, he says. "Some do multiplexing well, some do protocol conversion very well, but there are very few products that offer you a solution that has all of [our] needs."

But the long-haul environment is beginning to shift on another front. Carriers are gearing up their networks, moving from OC-192 to OC-768 and 40 Gb/s transport (Figure 2). Lucent is working on a trial with MCI WorldCom and will have nine trials under way shortly, Szelag says. "It is starting to be more [popular] than we though it would be," she says.

Eye on IP

Amid all the optical activity, fiber providers also will monitor IP developments.

"Providers have become very IP-literate," Szelag says. Carriers want to use IP to offer value-added services, which has led to a "fundamental change in bandwidth," she says. "It was wholesaling bandwidth, but now they are very much into the ISP-like services. They are partnering with ISPs to find creative ways to sell to business and residential [customers]."

Mike Sava, senior vice president of network engineering and operations at Extant, backs her claim. "You'd be crazy not to look at the evolution of IP. It's a packet world," he says. Sava will evaluate voice-over-IP products and IP devices that support service levels using standard approaches such as DiffServ or multiprotocol label switching.

Lucent is tackling that challenge with its focus on the optical Internet, Szelag says. The company will demo several products at the show, including its LambdaRouter optical cross-connect, which supports mesh networking in an optical environment, and the WaveStar DataExpress, which integrates IP into an OC-192 transport device.

"You're feeding IP traffic into the optical network at the edge - the premises location or close to the customer," Szelag says. MFN will deploy the WaveStar later this year, she adds.

Lucent also will discuss plans to integrate technologies from two acquired companies: Nexabit Networks and Sycamore Networks. The company will highlight "mesh-based restoration though an all-IP optical network," Szelag says. "We're doing optical restoration, provisioning and trunk maintenance in the same way you do it in an IP network. And we have common network management for the IP and the optical parts of the network."

Astral Point also will showcase an optical mesh solution. The company's optical service architecture integrates DWDM and frame and cell switching with a self-healing mesh ring. It interoperates with Sonet, ATM and IP and provides restoration in less than 50 milliseconds.

"Carriers need to have protection and restoration," says Bill Mitchell, vice president of marketing at Astral Point Communications. "Without a mesh-oriented topology, they have to organize those fibers in rings to allow Sonet to go over the rings. We've provided the same protection capability that the carrier enjoys with Sonet, but we do it with a scalable mesh network."

You cannot build on optics alone

Having a fast fiber network in place isn't worth much if the access technologies can't keep up. With the increased demand for services, this area of the network is growing at a breakneck speed.

Allied Riser Communications is a broadband IP-based, optical service provider that delivers fiber-to-the-desktop services to business customers. The technologies and product designs revealed at the show affect the planning of ARC's technology road map, says John H. Davis, chief technical officer and a director on the board of ARC.

He's looking for advancements in the access world. "We home in on metro points of presence, access to the metro ring - anything in that space that provides timely availability of those services is of interest to me," Davis says. Technologies that simplify the network architecture such as gigabit Ethernet and products in the application space also are appealing.

"We try to see all the competing suppliers in those spaces and triangulate where they are headed," he says.

Broadwing also is looking for access and last-mile solutions. "We're focusing on DSL services as a mechanism for IP services and on integrated access as a mechanism for both voice and data services, particularly over an IP pipe," says Chris Rothlis, vice president of engineering for Broadwing. The company uses integrated access devices from Vina Technologies, he says. "We're looking to take that to the next step and provide voice over IP and/or voice over ATM."

Rothlis' other areas of interest are multiservice access devices, network management systems and wireless technologies - involving microwave, licensed and unlicensed frequencies. In fact, Broadwing has tested an unnamed free space optical system. "We ran a trial through heavy rain, high winds and heat. It performed very well," meeting five 9s reliability under constant testing, Rothlis says.

Having the hardware is not enough, of course. Operations support system and network management are integral to network planning, says Williams' Biery. "We're doing a lot of work now to integrate our network management architecture closer in."

So has Jim Orr, formerly with GST and now director of network planning for CapRock Communications. Orr has tuned his radar to media gateways with SS7 integration. "There are at least two dozen new entrants since last year. This [show] offers me the opportunity to see their [SS7] integration plans or to influence existing vendors in one direction or another," he says.

One of the biggest benefits of the show is to catch up on standards progress, Orr says. "You can see who is writing to what standards [and] not just on SS7."

Extant won't be sitting in on standards debates at the show, however. "Supercomm is more of a marketing showcase," Bennett says. "At other shows, you get into more technical debates. This is big show with a lot or marketing pizzazz."

Other technology areas attracting providers' attention are voice switching, ATM backbone products and integrated access devices for ATM. Softswitches have been a hot topic at other shows, and Orr predicts Supercomm will be no different. "I expect the show to be highly softswitch-centric," he says.

Softswitch technologies are advancing in voice capabilities, Biery says. "They are working toward voice and data convergence," he says.

Biery also is intrigued by the markets that have a flurry of upstart activity. In addition to watching the optical startup companies, he is eyeing the terabit router and softswitch companies. "There are new vendors coming out and long-term players [moving into] terabit router and switch technologies," he says.

Vendors take heed

Although following product developments and collecting information is certainly the selling point of Supercomm, there also are side benefits. "The highest value [of Supercomm] is in finding out what happened to my old network [colleagues]," says Allied Riser's Davis. "In one year the whole industry changes. I can reconnect with people who were in different roles from a year ago. I spend as much time as I can making and remaking those acquaintances."

The brain trusts are lured to Supercomm, knowing they can see nearly every vendor, partner and competitor gathered under one roof. But the key to Supercomm is to go in, get the info and move on. There isn't time to waste, fiber operators say.

"Don't bring me the marketing fluffy guy," Orr cautions. "I want the best technically savvy person you can get out of the office." And vendors shouldn't promise something they can't deliver.

"Vendors are aware that an awful lot of decisions are made at Supercomm," he says. "They better have it right."

There is nothing new about telecom companies sharing the cost of constructing fiber networks. But Byers Engineering Co. and bandwidth.com have taken this idea a step further by developing an online service that makes it easier and more confidential for potential partners to connect.

"Co-building has been going on for 20 years. It has just been difficult putting the people together," says Jay Morris, director of business development for Byers. "We tried to create a venue or matchmaking opportunity for people to easily find each other and be able to pull up any one of hundreds of routes - currently under construction, getting close to closing on construction or in the feasibility stage - in order to identify a way to drive down the cost."

Byers, a consulting and turnkey engineering company, and bandwidth.com, a bandwidth broker for service providers and enterprises, screen companies to ensure the legitimacy of their information before letting them post routes online at www.bandwidth.com.

The companies also qualify requests from companies looking to contact a party concerning a posted route. No contact information about a posting company will be given until the inquiring party is "proven to have the means and wherewithal to get involved in a co-construction project opportunity," Morris says.

The service will also make it easier for non-traditional players to get more involved in this space. Twenty-five percent to 50% of all routes that are in either the feasibility stage or are ready for construction have some sort of co-build partner involved, Morris says. Projects range from four carriers sharing capacity to a pipeline company taking a certain number of ducts in exchange for its rights of way.

"Every railway company, utility company and pipeline company, if they are not today, will one day be in the communications business in some way, fashion or form," Morris says.

Co-building fiber is a hot issue, although the service also is designed to match parties for projects on co-building central offices and wireless networks. "The routes are coming in, and we get 500 to 750 users a day hitting some section of the co-build site," says David Morken, president of bandwidth.com.

In addition to coordinating co-building partners, the companies are working toward allowing parties to post their rights of way so a carrier looking to build in a certain area would have a comprehensive selection of parties to chose from when considering what direction to build. "It's also a way for folks who own rights of way to post anonymously where they are and what they own in a searchable fashion." Morken says.

Neither company charges for the co-building service. bandwidth.com sees it as a value-added service to existing carrier and enterprise customers.

Unlike some construction companies that take an equity position in the network by taking a few fiber strands for themselves, Byers is sticking with its 30-year strategy to remain a service company designed to help carriers build their networks.