The need for speed: Wave of optical news emphasizes power of network

The flurry of customer and trial announcements from optical networking equipment providers the first week of 2000 made one thing perfectly clear: Equipment providers know that the more bandwidth customers have available at a good price, the more they will use.

Quantum Bridge revealed that Comcast would run a trial of Quantum Bridge's optical access system that dynamically splices and provisions wavelengths, enabling service providers to address the high-bandwidth needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

Separately, Avici Systems announced that Enron Communications would be its first commercial customer to deploy its TSR terabit switch router.

The same week, Allegiance Telecom made dark fiber deals totaling $150 million with Metromedia Fiber Network and Level 3 Communications. This will accelerate Allegiance's plan to purchase dark fiber and deploy Sonet equipment, thus capturing demand for high-bandwidth services and applications in its fastest growing metropolitan markets.

While these three announcements appear unrelated, they have one thing in common, said Deb Mielke, principal for Treillage Network Strategies. "It's all about speed," she said, adding that IP and the ever-increasing demand to deliver high-speed services also are common factors. "It's sort of like making money. The more you make, the more you spend," she said. The trend has nothing to do with the technology, specifically, Mielke said. It's simply akin to human nature.

Quantum Bridge hopes to take advantage of the demand by letting service providers leverage their embedded fiber bases. "There's a lot of investment in e-commerce, but these types of business-to-business applications all have one thing in common: lots of bits," said Jeff Gwynne, vice president of marketing for Quantum Bridge. Businesses using high-bandwidth applications are not properly served with the copper infrastructure, he added.

The Quantum Bridge and Comcast trial is a "neat story" that marries two technologies: cable and dense wave division multiplexing, Mielke said. With its optical access system, Quantum Bridge now has "100 different ways to position itself."

Quantum Bridge's optical access system uses low-cost passive optics, made up of the QB5000 optical access switch, which sits at the central office, and the QB100 intelligent optical terminal, which sits on the customer premises. Together they let competitive local exchange carriers and ISPs fan out wavelengths to customers and scale services to meet each customers' needs.

The technology will give multiple system operators such as Comcast access to market share in areas where they did not have access in the past. Market share is key, Mielke said. "Now valuation is not about profit. It's all about market share."

Allegiance also hopes to gain market share and take advantage of customers' insatiable desire for bandwidth. The service provider advanced to phase two of its Smart Build strategy ahead of schedule, shifting from co-location sites and leased fiber to owned fiber because of the economic benefits, said an Allegiance spokesman. The provider is in a quiet period.

Level 3 will provide Allegiance with a long-distance route between Boston, New York and Washington and dark fiber rings in Denver, Detroit and San Diego. MFN also will provide long-distance fiber capacity between New York and Washington, and capacity in Allegiance's 13 U.S. markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, northern New Jersey, Oakland and Orange County, Calif.

Despite the quiet period, it was time for Allegiance to make some noise, Mielke said. She attributed the two agreements to network expansion, noting that Allegiance now has a coast-to-coast network reach. "Now they can link it all together," she said.

Likewise, Enron is going for reach but also is taking advantage of the capacity available in the optical layer using Avici's TSR, said Surya Panditi, Avici's president and CEO.

Avici unveiled a composite trunking capability on its TSR, which allows carriers to adjust bandwidth dynamically, depending on customer needs, by adding or subtracting capacity to fiber. With Avici's TSR, carriers can start with a smaller number of OC-48s and scale up without having to reconfigure the network.

"Enron represents a new breed of backbone carriers building scalable networks. What is predictable is that it's unpredictable," said Panditi, referring to bandwidth demand. "If you don't have available bandwidth, great service suddenly becomes not so great."