Ciena expands metro optical reach for regional networks

Ciena claims to have more than doubled the reach of its 4200 multiservice transport platform, converting the metro optical platform into a regional and even long-haul networking one.

A package of new hardware and software takes the 4200’s reach from 600 km to 1500 km, the equipment vendor said. New high-power amplifiers — both erbium-doped and Raman — plus a new dispersion compensation module and new 10 Gb/s tunable lasers combine to allow longer spans between network nodes without regeneration. And new software allows for power-level regulation, dispersion compensation control and loss-borrowing.

Demand for this longer reach is being fueled largely by carriers’ desire to consolidate and centralize network points of presence to accommodate high stores of content for IPTV, social networking and peer-to-peer applications, Ciena said. Their efforts to transition their metro networks from legacy Sonet architectures to metro wavelength division multiplexing and packet-based technologies is “starting to slow down now,” said Andy McCormick, Ciena’s product marketing manager for the 4200. And having completed their long-haul networks at least half a decade ago, carriers are now eyeing the gap between their ultralong-haul networks — which can span more than 1500 km between nodes — and their metros, which can span between 50 km and 500 km, roughly speaking.

Ciena isn’t the first vendor to try to adapt a metro platform for regional networks. Equipment vendors have also made the same push in the opposite direction, producing metro versions of long-haul gear. But according to Jimmy Yu, director of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group, vendors generally have had more success bulking up metro platforms for regional networks than they’ve had trying to collapse the high cost structure of long-haul platforms. In fact, Ciena knows this first-hand, he said.

“Ciena took their CoreStream [long-haul platform] and tried to make that multireach,” Yu said. “That wasn’t successful.”

About half the metro optical platforms deployed in the past year were used in regional networks, Yu said, while less than 20% of long-haul platforms were applied that way.

Despite Ciena’s numbers, Yu thinks the newly expanded 4200 will be applied mostly to regional networks with spans between 300 km and 600 km, which he says is still a big jump from the 2 km to 60 km spans typical in metros.

In penetrating regional networks, Ciena will no doubt look to leverage the incumbency of the 4-year-old 4200, which has been installed by more than 150 customers, including BT’s 21^st Century Network, due largely to its flexible port-programmable architecture. One place it does not appear to have that incumbency is in the network of Verizon Communications, which has deployed packet optical transport gear from Tellabs and Fujitsu Network Communications in more than 1000 locations in recent years.

Outside those two players, Ciena will also pit the regional 4200 against Nortel Networks, which despite its financial problems, sold well into regional networks last year; Nokia Siemens Networks, which introduced new multihaul gear last summer; and Infinera, whose widely deployed gear was originally designed for regional networks.