A new life for an all-optical technology

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. Seven-year-old Calient Networks seems out to prove the same isn't true of American telecom equipment vendors.

With a new $15 million round of funding in April 2004 (an add-on to a $20 million round three months prior), the company redesigned its optical core switch for access networks, creating a central office (CO) cross-connect to manage the rising tide of access fiber. It introduced that product last week.

Calient was part of a breed of well-funded, all-optical switch vendors, including Corvis and X-Ros, that rose and fell with the telecom bubble. (Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks ceased development of their all-optical switches in 2002, just two years after Nortel paid $3.25 billion to acquire one.) Calient collected something north of $265 million in funding for that phase of its operation.

Though Calient's microelectical mechanical systems (MEMS — tiny tilting mirrors that switch optical signals) weren't embraced by the Bells, the company hopes to see the technology's second act in carriers' lives.

Deploying its redesigned cross-connect in COs, Calient is offering to eliminate patch panels, allowing carriers to locate problems in fiber access networks by switching optical signals to third-party test equipment.

“We've been working in this for seven years,” said Steffen Koehler, Calient's marketing director. “We've done a lot to beat the cost out of the design.”

Last year, when Lambda Optical Systems revived MEMS for regional and metro networks, former In-Stat analyst Marlene Bourne told Telephony the bubble burst left MEMS with a perception problem. “A lot of the negative aspects of MEMS — the fears that they're fragile, that they've got moving parts that are going to stick — a lot of that was coming from [vendors of] competitive technologies that were seeing MEMS gaining a strong foothold and trying to stop the train a little,” Bourne said. “Customers quickly moved past those issues. Now it's clearly a proven next-generation technology. It's just that no one's willing to invest in it.”

Well, almost no one.

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