THE O IN METRO

Alex Saunders, President and CEO of Metrobility Optical Systems, has been turning heads in the metro Ethernet equipment market with gear that addresses Ethernet management for critical applications. But some of the last folks to take note, he told Telephony’s Ed Gubbins, are U.S. carriers looking for ways to manage metro Ethernet more effectively.

On U.S. customers:

IP Networks, a CLEC that offers metro Ethernet, uses our equipment. Time Warner Telecom has been using it for six months; now they’re beginning to use it also as access devices feeding into CWDM [coarse wavelength division multiplexing]. Cogent has over a million dollars of our gear in their networks. The New York Stock Exchange, we’re all over that account. They had a requirement we helped satisfy: No trading desk can be down for more than one second. The network is architected with diverse fiber routes, redundant switches and servers. Should a switch or server fail, fiber get cut or link on a port fail, Metrobility’s line protection and restoration surrounds all that equipment. We can transfer over in 200 microseconds. That’s installed in the American Stock Exchange, T. Rowe Price, the Chicago Board of Trade, ABC TV, CNN and a number of other places. We also are into places like Charter Communications. Through one of the large system integrators, we’re being installed in new battleship networks; there’s a project going on to upgrade the command and control systems, and they’re using Ethernet for it.

On U.S. partners:

Domestically, Walker & Associates, which sells to a lot of service providers, handles our product. Our largest reseller in the U.S. is TechData, but they primarily sell to enterprises. Goldfield Telecom handles our product in the western U.S.

On Metrobility’s new Gig-E offering:

When we first started shipping, the demand was more for Gig-E by the big CLECs--Yipes and others like that. We didn’t have Gig-E immediately. During the telecom downturn, we heard, “We want 10/100-Mb/s copper feeding into 100-Mb/s fiber. And later on, you can give us the Gig-E version.” They do not want to tell the customer to change out any CPE equipment at all. When we put a box in, they want a demarcation point--this is the customer’s equipment, this is the service provider’s. The product we ship today doesn’t require any IP address. That’s another thing the AH standard calls out: The demarcation point should not have an IP address. The benefits are easier for service providers to manage because they don’t have to manage all the IP addresses at the customer site. It becomes more secure: How do you hack into that particular device? We’ve been doing a lot of 100-Mb/s, now Gig-E is starting to roll out.

On big carriers:

The only major carrier in the U.S. that’s out there with any kind of [metro Ethernet] network is Verizon’s transport LAN service. We were part of the response to the large RFP [request for proposals] that they’ve had out but never closed. We were the finalist along with Canoga-Perkins, an installed incumbent. Though Verizon says they have not chosen a vendor yet, I believe they probably are going to stay with their incumbent because they have too much equipment already there. However, that RFP said that within six months of the ratification of the IEEE standard 802.3AH, the chosen vendor must be able to comply with it. We don’t think the incumbent will be able to do that. We can already ship a feature set like that. There’s a little bit done by BellSouth, but I would not call what they have an optical Ethernet metro service. I don’t think SBC has much in that area. MCI has our equipment in there. They’re coming out with an RFP--I think in March or April--that will specify all the 802.3AH features. There’s a lot more metro Ethernet deployment outside the U.S. They’re going on very fast as we speak.