CeBIT: ECI previews OTN gear

HANOVER, Germany--ECI Telecom offered a preview this week of product enhancements that will come to North America later this year. Exhibiting at the CeBIT trade show in Germany and absent from the Optical Fiber Communications/National Fiber Optics Engineers Conference in Anaheim, Calif., the Israeli optical equipment vendor announced new versions of its SDH products that it will apply to its Sonet gear toward the end of this year.

ECI announced a higher capacity version of its XDM multiservice provisioning platform (MSPP), with a new switch fabric that doubles the system’s capacity to 160 Gb/s without changing the physical size of the product.

In late February, the vendor issued a press release announcing the expansion of optical transport networking (OTN) technology to its XDM-40 metro access and business customer premises platform. Based on the International Telecommunications Union’s G.709 standard, OTN specifies a method of optical transport that encapsulates traffic within wavelengths without interfering with each packet’s existing embedded management information. The technology has several benefits, among which are its ability to uniformly multiplex and combine various disparate traffic types to satisfy demands for network convergence. But it is typically used in core, not access, networks.

Research analysis firm Current Analysis distributed a note this week calling the XDM-40 “one of the most cutting edge products in the metro access market,” since it is perhaps the first significant push by a vendor of OTN into access. However, the note’s author, J. Marcheck, also questioned whether or not there is demand for such an application. One of OTN’s key benefits is the way it enables carriers to dynamically provision optical links, which is very useful in core networks but perhaps not in metro access networks.

“The product might be overkill in access networks where more basic functionality is preferred,” he wrote. “In access networks, the primary goal is to simply pack as much traffic [as possible] over fixed links to metro networks. Even as the need for transport capacity increases, it is debatable whether the need to dynamically allocate bandwidth will be necessary.”

Putting OTN at the customer premises gives service providers end-to-end network monitoring capabilities, said Emanuel Nachum, ECI North America’s vice president of marketing, who said he sees plenty of demand for the architecture.