Photuris claims world’s first ROADM deployment

Metro optical equipment vendor Photuris is claiming to have launched the world’s first commercial deployment of a fully-reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) system, a much-anticipated technology that could significantly reduce the costs of deploying wavelengths while allowing carriers added flexibility in network planning.

Verizon Communications is using Photuris’ V32000 Optical Distribution System to interconnect three sites at Texas A&M University and the city of College Station, Texas, using OC-48 links and a mix of OC-3 and Gigabit Ethernet service interfaces.

ROADM lets carriers provision wavelengths strictly via software commands without having to send technicians to each network node to reconfigure jumpers and filters. Instead, the technology uses tunable lasers to move traffic from one wavelength to the next.

“There are no manual intervention steps,” said Ashish Vengsarkar, Photuris co-founder and vice president of product marketing. “It’s fully automated from a remote location.”

In addition to the reduced expense of technician truck rolls, one of the key benefits of the technology is the flexibility it allows carriers when planning networks. For instance, Vengsarkar said one of the reasons Verizon chose this gear for the private Texas network is the unpredictability of the network’s traffic patterns and the demand for additional network nodes.

“We can add new nodes to the network over time without affecting pre-existing traffic,” said Vengsarkar.

Verizon was not immediately available for comment.

Infonetics analyst Michael Howard said the news is a true technological milestone that puts Photuris at the head of the pack pursuing the ROADM market. Though Ciena, Marconi, Fujitsu and Tropic Networks are all pursuing the technology, Photuris is the first to announce a customer deployment, Howard said.

“Nobody else has publicly been able to state they have fully reconfigurable OADM,” said Howard. “It’s a brand new type of product.”

The general consensus among industry sources was that reconfigurability was not yet cost-effective because tunable filters—presumed to be a necessary element of reconfigurable networks along with tunable lasers—were prohibitively expensive.

Photuris’ system uses tunable lasers but not tunable filters. The vendor has used its own intellectual property to create its own line card, the Versicolor, which combines remote wavelength-switching capabilities with power-monitoring.

The company claims its ROADM system has been in trials with two other RBOCs for several months and expects to begin yet another RBOC trial later this month. It also claims to have completed lab trials with five non-RBOC customers.

Though the Verizon deployment will carry live traffic in a private network, it may also serve as a de facto trial for deployment in Verizon’s own network, since the true benefits of ROADM are expected to come from its inclusion in shared networks.