Product of the month
As our December cover story made clear, extending the reach of optical bandwidth to the customer recently has become a major focus of the optical equipment vendors. Breaking the bandwidth bottleneck in the local access loop is crucial to reducing service provisioning time while offering customers whatever service they like, when they like. What we're really after here is making the access network look like the long-haul network, capacity-wise.
For those network managers rolling their eyes, Quantum Bridge has a solution that has convinced a lot of telecom gurus. The start-up has set its sights on bringing broadband to typically bandwidth-starved businesses (especially small to medium-size). Its Optical Access System, comprised of the QB5000 Optical Access Switch (OAS) and the QB100 Intelligent Optical Terminal (IOT), can economically deliver 1 Mbps to 100 Mbps out to the premises via dedicated wavelengths. Comcast Communications, a broadband service provider, will do the beta honors, and early indications are good.
How does the OAS “extend” the light? With a passive optical network (PON), which communicates with the OAS at the POP/CO, and the IOT. Since PONs don't require active electronics in the outside plant, the solution is much cheaper. The system takes full advantage of the PON architecture with its Dynamic Wavelength Slicing™ (DWS) protocol, a technique that enables a single wavelength to deliver services among multiple end points. This means multiple customers can ride the same wavelength.
“Quantum Bridge's solution gives service providers a cost-effective way to deliver access rates from 1 Mbps to 100 Mbps to the underserved small to medium-size business market that faces a nasty bandwidth bottleneck in the local loop,” said Vertical Systems' Rosemary Cochran. “CLECs and MSOs should appreciate its use of existing fiber and PON, its scalability (a single wavelength can be shared by many businesses so service providers can cost-effectively scale service reach) and low cost of termination, estimated to run one-tenth that of ring technology.”
The system includes an integrated element management system for service provisioning, fault and performance management and SLAs, as well as partitioned management for carriers that wholesale to other service providers. The IOT is currently outfitted for 10/100 Ethernet, TDM, ATM and frame relay. With a 5-Gbps switching fabric, a single OAS at the POP can support several hundred IOTs.
The product in its conception is designed for low-cost service delivery, which will be very important for new CLECs hoping to compete for metro area services, said Scott Clavenna, principal analyst at Pioneer Consulting. “Today's broadband access services are either limited in their reliability and reach (DSL), or by their price (private lines) and do not scale well. VDSL shows signs of scaling DSL for end users near an access node or CO, but any access system based on fiber optics is orders of magnitude more reliable. Assuming the target market consists of emerging competitive carriers and some incumbent carriers looking for low-cost solutions for service expansion, this product should perform quite well vs. competing methods. The challenges carriers face when adopting this technology are obtaining or deploying the necessary fiber to bring this product out to individual customers and managing a PON, with which most carriers are not familiar. Though a PON is inherently less complex than one with active digital nodes, PONs have unique requirements that are unfamiliar to most technicians.”
The Optical Access System will be available in Q2 2000.
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