WANs and LANs merge again

It was another WAN/LAN partnership last week, but this time the teamwork between Alcatel Telecom and Newbridge Networks involved Sonet.

For the joint package, dubbed "Sonet Direct," Alcatel will add narrowband, wideband and broadband digital cross-connects to its WAN 1603/12 SM Sonet multiplexer. For its part, Newbridge will expand its LAN 3600/3645 MainStreet bandwidth manager to add high-capacity Sonet interfaces, the company's first foray into Sonet connections.

Bill Magill, senior analyst with Ryan, Hankin, Kent consultancy, San Francisco, said this is the first Sonet wide area network/local area network agreement he's aware of.Sonet has been a public network technology and is common in the WAN for trunking transmission. But it is migrating to enterprise networks, pushed in part by its role in asynchronous transfer mode transport. "What customers are really looking for is the enhanced reliability Sonet offers their network," Magill said.

One of the partnership's chief benefits to carriers is an already interoperable and robust network-manageable Sonet system using two vendors, said Tim Krause, Alcatel director of product marketing and business development.

"We spend an inordinate amount of time working with customers on network management and interoperability issues," he said. "Carriers view that as a tremendous burden."

Newbridge Assistant Vice President of Marketing Frank Trococli said, "Customers or service providers can create a service as low as DS-0, route through Sonet, travel multiple Newbridge or Alcatel nodes and connect at the network but still maintain all the point-and-click network management as if it was just an Alcatel or Newbridge system by itself."

Carriers are looking for a seamless LAN/WAN system, Magill agreed. With pre-interoperability testing by Alcatel and Newbridge, the companies can offer customers a guaranteed system.

"With Sonet migrating, it's become more competitive to offer transport services, and one way to compete is to guarantee reliability," he said.

The Alcatel/Newbridge alliance sprang from a joint enterprise project, Gulfnet 6000, in which the two companies linked 10 oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico using Sonet and each other's equipment.