LOCAL HERO

Not if you're a carrier. If you're a carrier and you want to put something in one of your cities, it has to cost less. If it's too much money up front and the return doesn't look good, it ain't happening. You expect that, too. You wait.

That's what happened with DWDM. Dense wavelength division multiplexing, child of the long-haul culture. Spent its youth splitting waves for the likes of Sprint, MCI, AT&T. Helped Qwest and Level 3 define themselves. But it was always too much for local, too pricey for the cities. So the locals waited.

Their luck could be about to change. DWDM is starting to trickle downtown. It's starting to make more sense. "This is the year that bandwidth comes closer to home," says Patrick Nettles, CEO of Ciena.

Hasn't exploded onto the urban scene yet, but might if prices plummet.

"The main issue is cost," says Barry Flanigan, an analyst for Ovum Research. "DWDM has not yet broken significant price barriers in the short-haul market."

And the first carriers likely to ride the metro? The ones with newer networks, more immediate issues-the ones trying to find alternative ways to make things fit together.

Everything's different when you're local. When you have a little network in a city, or a big network in a city, or a bunch of big networks in a bunch of big cities. Doesn't matter-you're still a little fish in a big pond, any way you slice it. You don't have to be all things to all people everywhere. You have a limited target market and a whole different set of problems.

You aren't running out of fiber, for example. The long-haul set put in DWDM because they had to, because they needed more capacity. Newcomers aren't exactly turning customers away because they're out of room.

The metro DWDM case is entirely different. Different reasons, different economics, different results.

"What will really push forward the market for metro DWDM is the more sophisticated optical networking architectures like metro rings," says Flanigan.

That's why Nortel Networks bought Cambrian even before Cambrian had announced a product sale. Liked the Cambrian concept of using DWDM to build virtual rings and a reliable metro backbone.

Now, Bell Canada has started a trial of the OPTera Metro system that Nortel got in the Cambrian buy. Using it to try out on-demand bandwidth provisioning, help crack the bottleneck between its backbone and its metro customers. With it, Bell Canada could flow metro customer traffic onto 32 ring-protected wavelengths per fiber. Protocol-independent, as far as the traffic is concerned.

GST Telecommunications is also starting to do it, using Ciena's MultiWave Sentry and MultiWave Firefly gear. Tying together its long-haul network with its local networks using just DWDM, skipping Sonet multiplexers and regenerators altogether. Did it in Las Vegas and Phoenix so far to figure out the hurdles. Found most of them in budgeting.

"There are a handful of technical issues, but it's more a matter of cost," says Steve Hensley, VP of engineering for GST. Part of the expense is in putting in fiber that can handle DWDM. "Most of the local loop stuff is single-color glass. It's kind of hard to put multimode on it."

Osicom's Ron Mackey, executive VP of technology, seconds that: "What sits in the ground in the metro is standard single-mode fiber. It wasn't designed to support the multiple channels of some of the long-haul systems. In the short haul, we want to deliver a high-end solution that doesn't force people to replace all their fiber."

Osicom's providing that to a utility upstart, TU Communications. Giving the carrier a metro solution that works with the fiber already there.

But there's also a management issue. With long-haul DWDM, it's is simpler to monitor and manipulate all those channels within a fiber. In a metro scheme everything's going every which way at different points. It's harder to keep track of.

"Metro WDM is moderately economical now, but it's not necessarily practical because of bandwidth management," says Kathy Szelag, vice president of marketing and strategy for Lucent Technologies' optical networking unit. "In a metro area where all these businesses are reorganizing and expanding, you're doing constant bandwidth rearrangement."

Osicom's Mackey: "The long-haul phone company is talking to itself-they control both ends of the network. In a metro environment, you're trying to provide access to a hundred different users. The mindset starts to change."

But there's an upside. Managing wavelengths in the metro may be more complicated, but in some cases the stakes aren't as high.

Mackey again: "Those metro customers typically aren't as demanding. The impact of downtime in a metro network is less significant than in a long-haul network in terms of revenue lost."

But: There's a DWDM contrarian in the carrier court. A fiber-rich group called Metromedia thinks DWDM in the metro is unnecessary. Because it has excessive fiber, it can replace what DWDM provides by reselling its capacity to other carriers.

"We enable WDM from the long-haul networks to continue its transmission path to the customer," says Stephen Garafolo, CEO of Metromedia. "In the local environment, it's easier for them to take more strands of fiber in the local loop."

Metromedia, installing supertrunks of fiber in the loop, making the cost of leasing it more reasonable. Can get 50 times the bandwidth for less cost-10 Gb/s on two strands of fiber.

And even if a carrier wants to split the wavelengths on the fiber they use, they have to get the fiber from somewhere if they don't already have it or if they have the wrong kind. Metromedia is standing by.

"There's no DWDM without having the fiber first," Garafolo says.

Even the main vendor forces behind metro DWDM admit the challenge in selling it. "This market is much more complex than the transport market," says Dan McCurdy, VP of corporate development at Ciena.

DWDM, slowly making a name on the urban scene. May never achieve that kind of status, but has already cemented some kind of future.

"I don't think it will take off in the same explosive fashion that happened in long-distance," says Flanigan, Ovum. "That same killer application isn't necessarily there for the metro market."