Oceans of bandwidth: Appian delivers intelligent optical access solution
Telephony April 10, 2000
TIM MCELLIGOTT
Appian Communications, a new company with a new approach to bandwidth management, is trying to create a new mindset among service providers with the introduction this week of its Optical Services Activation Platform 4800.
The OSAP 4800 is an optical access solution that delivers software-tunable bandwidth guarantees and on-demand provisioning to the service provider and?if the service provider so chooses?to the corporate end user.
"The last mile where time division multiplexing technology is predominant is the last great service bottleneck. We want to replace that with an intelligent optical edge," said Anand Parikh, vice president of marketing and founder of Appian.
Appian?s optical network edge consists of the OSAP 4800 hardware platform and the AppianVista Services and Element Manager. It is a single-ended solution that does not require equipment to be installed in the central office (CO). The OSAP can be installed in various customer locations such as the basement of a multitenant building, outside plant, an office park.
The OSAP will route multiple traffic types from different customers over a single local loop and deliver them to separate networks such as ATM, frame relay, IP or TDM.
"On either side of the last inch of that last mile, you have oceans of bandwidth. Enterprise networks have Ethernet backbones and the core network has high-speed Sonet or [dense wave division multiplexing]. But the way services are delivered are by using the same old TDM," Parikh said.
Appian?s goal is to make Ethernet the single universal service interface for delivering data?and eventually voice?to a service provider?s transport infrastructure. "Ethernet is the most dominant and ubiquitous enterprise technology today, and it?s going through the steepest cost reduction curve in the history of networking," Parikh said. "So why not deliver services using Ethernet instead of converting to DS-1, DS-3 or OC-3?"
Until a shift to straight Ethernet is accomplished, Appian will support traditional transmission infrastructures. OSAP?s initial configuration will include OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48 single wavelength network interfaces, 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and gigabit Ethernet customer interfaces, DS-1 TDM support and AppianVista Services Management software.
The benefit of OSAP over ATM or frame relay is the ability to provide incremental bandwidth on demand and do so remotely through a single piece of equipment.
"[Bandwidth on demand] can be delivered today through the extremely klugey mechanisms of ATM or other multiplexing mechanisms," said Stan George, CEO of Coreon, a soon-to-be-launched telecom start-up company. Previously, George was responsible for service and application development at Teleport Communications Group, now AT&T Local Services. "At TCG, in order to provision at a 10 megabit or fractional DS-3 rate, we would [use up] 45 megabits of bandwidth," George said. "I believe Appian brings a much more elegant solution on how to engineer these types of solutions."
Bandwidth allocation is controlled through a patent-pending technology that features two remote controlled dials that can tune bandwidth from 64 kb/s to 10 Gb/s. One dial tunes the guaranteed bit rate; the other tunes the maximum burst rate.
"Today, if anyone needs to change bandwidth at the customer end, it usually [requires] a dispatch. With this single-ended solution, [Appian] can achieve that without a truck roll," George said.
Tuning is done through a Web interface. Service providers can provide their corporate customers with access for tuning and self-provisioning bandwidth. Customers also can tune and allocate bandwidth based on time-of-day needs.
The system starts at $25,000 and will be available this summer. |
