Free-space optical devices take flight

LightPointe rebranded its free-space optical devices, which are now part of the Flight product family and unveiled plans for a 10 Gb/s wave division multiplexing device.

The company’s optical transport solutions use lasers to transmit traffic through the air at rates of 1.25 Gb/s. The devices will support 2.5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s transport by the end of the year.

FlightSpectrum contains WDM capabilities. “We’ve incorporated four wavelengths into the system,” said Baksheesh S. Gruman, vice president of marketing for LightPointe. The products are shipping, he added.

The Flight products are designed for metro environments, where laying fiber can be cost prohibitive, but carriers have deployed the technology in several ways. “Carriers are using it to compete Sonet rings, as a supplement to LMDS, in the metro core and for the last mile,” Gruman said.

Enterprise customers, where LightPointe got its start, use it to connect to offices and for storage area networks, he added. The company counts U.K.-based Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank and the Smithsonian Institution as enterprise customers but remains mum about its carrier customers, citing competitive advantage.

The advantages of a free-space optics solution are that it can be deployed quickly, where laying fiber can take months; it requires no FCC licenses nor rights-of-way; and it costs only a fifth of what a physical fiber network costs—“in time, not money,” Gruman said.

LightPointe’s products can be deployed in mesh and ring topologies, are protocol-independent and support rooftop-to-rooftop, window-to-window, and rooftop-to-window transport scenarios.