Lucent, Nortel weigh metro WDM

As a swarm of vendors circled the market for short-haul wave division multiplexing equipment in recent weeks, two of the largest global network equipment suppliers, Lucent Technologies and Northern Telecom, remained quiet.

That silence ended last week at the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference '97 in San Diego, as the two companies articulated somewhat different views. Lucent announced November availability for its new Metro Optical Line Solution (OLS) with Sonet interfaces at OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48, while Nortel opted to wait for a formal product announcement.

"There are immediate metropolitan applications for WDM with those Sonet interfaces," said Scott Grout, vice president of Lucent's Sonet and optical networking business. As an industry, "we can deploy higher bit-rate [time division multiplexing] systems, but we're hitting a ceiling," he said. The Metro OLS is a 16-channel system with support for varied network architectures, including ring, linear and flexible add/drop configurations. With a single optical amplifier, it spans distances up to 132 km.

Meanwhile, Nortel is eyeing short-haul opportunities judiciously. The company will continue to evaluate an ongoing short-haul WDM trial in the San Francisco Bay area involving the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, but it has not announced further plans. "The metropolitan market is moving fast as an application, and we have all the building blocks in place for a product," said Mike Unger, group vice president of transport networks at Nortel.

Nortel is closely studying potential operational barriers to deployment of short-haul WDM such as quality of service and scalability issues. "When you're putting wavelengths in everywhere, it might be hard to tell how well everything is working. We're learning a lot from the DARPA project," said Brian McFadden, assistant vice president of brand management for Sonet networks at Nortel.

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