In it for the long haul

Sycamore eschews difficult market with enhanced transport system

Sycamore Networks hopes its enhanced SN 10000 transport system provides the improvements in capacity, dependability and flexibility to spark spending in the battered long-haul and ultra-long-haul markets.

Many carriers are struggling with overcapacity in long-haul networks and difficult capital markets. But Sycamore officials say doom-and-gloom predictions are overstated, noting that RHK estimates $9 billion will be spent on long-haul equipment this year.

“There's some thought out there that carriers aren't building any more transport, but that's actually not correct,” said Mike Anderson, Sycamore Networks director of product management. “It's just that the perception is going to be different than it was in the last two years [when] people saw competitive local exchange carriers purport to building out these huge, new national networks.”

Instead, most long-haul transport business will come from legacy carriers that are revamping or expanding existing networks such as KPNQwest, which has deployed the enhanced SN 10000 in its Nordic ring.

“It's an indication of the kind of shifts vendors are going to have to make in order to be successful to break into those kind of accounts, as opposed to CLECs,” Anderson said.

Indeed, the KPNQwest contract is a big one for Sycamore, according to Chris Nicoll, vice president of telecom infrastructure for Current Analysis.

“It shows the flexibility of the 10000 to be used over marginal fiber, which gives service providers more options for building out their networks,” he said.

Providing carriers with choices is at the heart of Sycamore's enhanced platform, which will be generally available in six weeks, Anderson said. New 10 Gb/s line cards let carriers double the capacity with the SN 10000 to 1.6 Tb/s, and Sycamore's homegrown super forward error correction (SuperFEC) technology doubles signal range to more than 2400 kilometers without expensive regeneration.

Other transport systems proclaim greater distances, but Anderson said the SN 10000 is more cost-effective for carriers because it lets them add and drop any wavelengths at any time without impairing network performance.

“If you start thinking about building a 2500-kilometer route, odds are you're going to have to add and drop some traffic,” he said, adding that with most ultra-long-haul systems, as soon as providers have to add and drop traffic, they have to use regenerators. “As soon as you put the regens in, you've completely mitigated the benefits of having the ultra-long-haul system,” he said.

Minimizing regenerations also makes network planning much easier for carriers, Anderson said.

Perhaps the most important enhancement to the SN 10000 involves provisioning wavelengths remotely. “We've been able to take a process that normally would take 30 days and reduce it to minutes,” Anderson said.

It's a feature that will be critical to carriers' bottom lines, said Dave Dunphy, senior analyst for optical infrastructure at Current Analysis.

“In the existing paradigm, you've got to send people out and run truck rolls it's a lot of money in terms of people's time and the skill of the people to do that stuff,” Dunphy said. “When you're talking about saving a number of hours at each site on a per-wavelength basis and the amount of money people pay to outsource that's definitely going to [impact] net revenue.”

And such savings might be compelling enough to persuade carriers to invest in long-haul equipment, Anderson said.

“There's still a lot of money being spent [in the long-haul arena], just maybe not as much hype as in some of the other areas,” he said.