Lighting with a purpose

Although most will forever associate southeastern Florida with the 2000 presidential election, BellSouth sees dollar signs — and lots of them. After starting a project in August of last year, BellSouth last week turned up its new network access point (NAP), called the BellSouth Multimedia Internet Exchange, that will facilitate traffic from service providers. Much of that traffic is heading to and from Latin America, which is seeing strong data-traffic growth.

The new NAP is the first to be built in six years and, unlike the eight existing NAPs around the country, BellSouth's NAP will use intelligent optical networking at its core rather than ATM. The idea behind the optical core is to bring greater scale and flexibility to the NAP, enabling the facility to support up to OC-192 traffic rather than being limited to lower speeds afforded by an ATM-based core.

“The NAP has many firsts,” said Ralph de la Vega, president of broadband and Internet services for BellSouth. “It is the first to use intelligent optical networking, and it has many other firsts in terms of design. Instead of having one centralized location, it is multi-nodal and has four nodes.”

Those nodes are located in access facilities in the familiar election debate areas of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties (see figure).

By placing nodes throughout the region, NAP customers should have more choice about where to locate their businesses, instead of being forced to be in close proximity to a centralized location. This strategy is designed to alleviate some of the costly backhauling service providers are often forced to do.

“The multi-nodal approach makes sense because [service providers] don't have to come to one point,” de la Vega said. “We take it to the customer to meet at their location.”

The nodes are not housed in BellSouth buildings — the usual method — but in buildings close to customers such as Exodus and ImpSat. To add redundancy, the NAP's connections consist of a mesh of fiber from BellSouth and FPL FiberNet.

While more efficient data transport always sounds good, the profit motives are clear. BellSouth hopes to benefit from the businesses feeding on traffic from Latin America.

“It made no sense for us to have huge traffic from Latin America only to go to Dallas or D.C.,” de la Vega said. “We think if we keep it here, it will significantly reduce latency.”

At the core of the NAP, BellSouth is using Sycamore's SN-8000 and SN-16000 optical equipment. Although the MIX has removed ATM from the core, it will still use ATM for public peering, according to Susan Campbell, senior director of the BellSouth Internet Exchange.

BellSouth selected Sycamore's equipment because of its flexibility and interoperability with customer equipment, Campbell said.

“Networks are changing because user needs are changing,” said Jeff Kiel, vice president and general manager of Sycamore's core switching business unit.

By using the optical technology, service providers will be able to get high-speed, reliable capacity when and where they need it, Kiel said.

Others agree with the concept of using optical networking for the NAP.

“I like what BellSouth is doing as far as dispersing the access to the Internet exchange,” said Chris Nicoll, vice president at Current Analysis. “It certainly should help do some load balancing and provide some greater resiliency from an access perspective.”

And by bringing access points closer to the actual [service provider] customers, they will need fewer network hops and have fewer elements to manage on the transport path, according to Nicoll.

Global Crossing also is reportedly working on developing a NAP in the region, although it will be ATM-based.