Maybe next year

After several years promised to be "The Year of DWDM," it seems that we're in for another year of unbridled optimism - but that doesn't translate into deployment. Dense wave division multiplexing is a sure thing in the long-haul environment. But despite its promises, metro adoption is still slow.

The benefits are tempting. Ease fiber exhaust. Get more bandwidth for the continuous upswing in data traffic. Personalize service.

But the economics just aren't there. Metro WDM costs too much. Who wants to upgrade the whole metro ring so that a few high-capacity customers will get more bandwidth? And how many carriers are ready to sink that kind of money into the metro network if what they have still works?

Vendors speculate about what will finally push metro DWDM forward. They make predictions - not light-heartedly - and base their business plans on them. Several companies are developing products to bring metro WDM to fruition. Ciena is hot on the trail with a 21-city Cable & Wireless deployment, which could expand to 40 more cities next year if all goes well, and a Completel deployment in Paris.

Other folks moving into the metro space are Chromatis Networks, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Optical Networks. Although each company's spin is slightly different, the focuses appear to be the same. At NFOEC in Chicago last week, companies touted the future of metro WDM as a means to provide outsourced corporate data services, wavelength management services and an overall reduction in operating costs.

Admittedly, service opportunities are practically limitless with WDM in metro markets, and the data infusion will solidify that. Carriers can pick up where their LAN brethren must stop. Network integrators can maintain private enterprises up to the WAN link. There, service providers take over and provide reliable, dedicated wavelength services. Need more bandwidth? Pick your color. During the business day, when peak usage is high, it's a dedicated link. But at night, when residential Internet use climbs, providers can reprovision the network to accommodate home users.

On top of that, outsourcing data services brings in more cash for providers - particularly if they create some type of monthly maintenance agreement - and eliminates some of the burden on the overworked internal IT staff. Off-site data storage will increase traffic on the network. Wavelength services between corporate offices or to a corporation's customers can be dedicated and guaranteed. Carriers can proactively offer suggestions on how to optimize the transport capabilities or when to increase capacity.

That's the proverbial win-win situation. Customers get more bandwidth when they need it, and they get more specialized attention. Carriers can use the existing bandwidth more efficiently and generate revenues from the added services.

But the major hurdle to metro WDM acceptance is the price tag. Cutting the cost of networking, presumably, is every carrier's goal. But operating costs include more than equipment. The people dispatched to install, maintain and troubleshoot equipment in the field are valuable, but expensive and, unfortunately, error-prone. That eats up time and revenues.

This is the essential issue, said Denny Bilter, director of marketing for Ciena. "DWDM has solved the bandwidth crisis, but the cost of operations is going up faster than the revenue."

Ciena compared network costs with revenue growth and found that one service provider's network costs increased by 72%, but revenues went up only 18%.

Equipment costs are down about 98%, but human labor is up 30%, said Rick Dodd, director of product management. "It costs more to plan and provision optical networks than it does to deploy them."

The solution is to build more intelligent optical devices. Many of these devices are still in development but will incorporate functionality from multiple network elements. The goal is to install less equipment, cut capital costs, reduce the number of potential failure points and ease administration. Then, the extra time and money can be shifted to creating services.

Optical Networks and Chromatis are moving in for the lambda management kill. Both have announced solutions that will enable wavelength-based services.

The promise of metro WDM is there, it has just been slow to surface, partly because of the lack of products available. But companies have stated their visions and slated products for 2000. Maybe the beginning of the millennium will mark DWDM's metro upswing.