A DIMMER YEAR FOR EQUIPMENT VENDORS

Optical vendors at this year's Supercomm are likely to compensate for the egregious hype of previous years with a more toned-down attitude. Vendors that hired circus acrobats to perform high-wire acts above their booths in years past, for example, might try to win your attention this year with Geena, the temp who can almost juggle.

At the Optical Fiber Communication conference in March, Lucent Technologies made it clear that its announcements at Supercomm would likely be new customers, not new products. And Nortel Networks recently made similar intimations. “We're trying to focus more on opportunities for providers as opposed to what's new and sexy on our boxes,” said Rob Keates, director of marketing for Nortel's optical networks group.

Nortel will be one of many vendors at the show urging carriers to use Ethernet services to add top-line growth. But incumbent carriers in the U.S. are still likely to be somewhat hesitant, given Ethernet's reputation for sloppiness and its potential to eat into existing frame relay business. By 2007, according to IDC, more than 60% of metro Ethernet equipment revenues will come from Asia, so vendors at Supercomm may end up chasing after anyone who happens to be wearing a SARS mask.

Another technology sure to be pushed heavily at the show is coarse wavelength division multiplexing, the poor man's WDM. Vendors unable to move pricey dense WDM to cash-strapped carriers have flocked to CWDM in recent months, many of them selling it as a low-risk stepping stone toward DWDM. But although carriers like the technology, its usage in point-to-point enterprise networks may not open any new doors for DWDM gear.

Furthermore, carriers' interest in CWDM is unlikely to justify the number of players now in the space. Consequently, competition may grow intense, and Supercomm could spark a CWDM catfight among attending vendors. “Everyone will make like they have a unique message, but they're all going to be saying the same thing: CWDM leads to metro DWDM,” said Mark Lutkowitz, principal analyst for Telecom Pragmatics.

One vendor, Appian Communications, plans to straddle both bandwagons, announcing a so-called “services termination unit” that helps carriers migrate to Ethernet as well as a CWDM module for its service activation software.

In the optical access market, meanwhile, digital loop carrier vendor AFC has promised to unveil its first fiber-to-the-home solution at the show.

And at the components level, the usual suspects are likely to make big promises — tunable lasers, all-optical add/drop multiplexers — but their limelight may be stolen by new chipsets bearing generic framing procedure, or GFP. GFP chips provide an inexpensive way to map Ethernet onto Sonet networks. And they're getting cheaper, which will make it even easier for carriers with Sonet networks to blend everything from voice to storage transport.

“GFP is the key enabler,” said Nortel's Keates. “It's the cool new stuff.”

Cool new stuff at Supercomm? What year is this?