The new PhotonEx game

Optical start-up aims to eliminate capacity vs. distance trade-off Good things come to those who wait. Start-up PhotonEx hopes that adage applies to it - and its potential customers. This week marks the official launch of the company, which closed an $80 million second round of financing and is developing a high-capacity core optical system for long-haul and ultra long-haul networks.

PhotonEx has "a new vision of the backbone network - a more flexible backbone, and it's services-aware," said CEO Kristin Rauschenbach.

The company is building a high-capacity system that integrates software with "an awareness of the above layer," she added. It is designed with off-the-shelf components to support 40 Gb/s from the get-go.

"That keeps the speed of the backbone ahead of the feeds coming into it, so we're not gasping for breath to get to 40 Gb/s," Rauschenbach said. In addition to supporting mesh and ring architectures, the system integrates software hooks to allow carriers to migrate to a more flexible backbone that can be provisioned dynamically, she said.

The PhotonEx team has "a deep understanding" of optical engineering, components and RF engineering and has designed the system "so we can start the game at 40 Gb/s," Rauschenbach said. She expects PhotonEx will change how carriers think about networks. "We will create a backbone to eliminate the trade-offs at the optical layer," she said, referring to the trade-off between distance and capacity.

One of PhotonEx's advantages is the strength of its development team, which has the solid industry background that is critical for a start-up, said Russ McGuire, a vice president for TeleChoice.

Rauschenbach, a co-founder of PhotonEx, logged eight years as a researcher in M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory and founded the Advanced Network Group to promote the commercial adoption of optical breakthroughs. She is joined by Katherine Hall, co-founder and chief technology officer, and Nanying Yin, executive vice president of product development. Hall, a colleague from Lincoln Labs, is an expert in optical logic, and Yin brings expertise in routing, packet technologies and queuing theory, Rauschenbach said. PhotonEx is licensing technology from Lincoln Labs.

The system will be capable of supporting transport across "hundreds of kilometers to megameters," Rauschenbach said. The Lincoln Labs researchers pushed 10 Gb/s across 12,000 kilometers in 1997. The ultra long-haul systems heralded today - such as the one from Corvis - transport 10 Gb/s up to about 4000 kilometers, and many still are in development.

"The group is focused on doing something next year that other vendors are doing two to three years out. They could leapfrog the future crop of established ultra long-haul [vendors]," said Scott Clavenna, president of PointEast Research.

Even the name - which emphasizes "photonics" rather than "lightwaves" - indicates that PhotonEx focuses "more on the particle nature rather than the wave nature" of optical networking, McGuire said."The particle nature offers more flexibility. It's moving away from a circuit-switched model to an optical packet model."

But watching technology work in the lab is not the same as deploying it in the field.

"They are early in the start-up phase," McGuire cautioned. "They need to deliver on what they are promising. If they can do that, they seem to be a step above other vendors."

The second round of financing brings the company's total to $88 million. Investors include Oak Investment Partners, Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Essex Investment Management.

This week marks the launch of TelecomClick, a new vertical portal owned by the IndustryClick subsidiary of Primedia. TelecomClick will aggregate content from several business-to-business publications and integrate it with original editorial content and new delivery initiatives. It also will serve as the new online home for Telephony's Web presence, www.internettelephony.com.

"TelecomClick offers a vertical view of the telecom industry through a unique combination of original Web content and services, strong affiliations with market-leading magazines, and broad aggregation of industry news covering everyone from the largest service providers to the smallest business enterprise users," said Dan O'Shea, content director for TelecomClick.

TelecomClick will offer a wide range of online content, including original news, features and special reports that draw from and build upon the content of the site's affiliate publications. Editorial coverage will encompass broadband network technology and broadband content efforts such as streaming audio and video and business and financial news related to the various sectors of the communications industry. TelecomClick also will generate community features such as discussion rooms and topic-specific e-mail newsletters.

TelecomClick can be accessed at www.telecomclick.com. Dan O'Shea can be reached at doshea@industryclick.com.