Cisco buying this company for 800 million. Startup Qeyton launches DWDM system for metro apps
By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(08/09/99, 2:45 p.m. EST)
STOCKHOLM, Sweden ? A startup formed by developers from L.M. Ericsson's transport network application lab will come to this fall's National Fiber Optics Engineering Conference with a dense wave-division multiplexing (DWDM) system optimized for metropolitan applications.
Qeyton, formed last summer with a round of financing from Stockholm venture capital firms, has hired several luminaries from the European optical networking industry, including Bob Batchellor, the WDM program manager at Ericsson who helped develop that company's FlexingBus architecture for DWDM. Qeyton has devised a very low-cost, low-power (8 W per channel) system that competitive local-exchange carriers and Internet service providers can use for moving to DWDM capacity without using optical amps in the network.
The first-generation Qeyton system, the QS200, will have a reach of 100 km without the use of optical amps. Future systems with optical fiber amps spaced in 50-km increments will allow modular expansion to larger geographic regions.
The Qeyton architecture supports sub-millisecond protection switching on the optical layer, with protection capable of being assigned to individual wavelengths in the system. It is compatible with any networks using Sonet-layer protection switching, though Batchellor said that Qeyton recommends that new networks use optical protection switching on the lowest layer, combined with Internet Protocol-layer redundancy for data packets. The client layer interface port in the systems is both protocol- and rate-independent, allowing the system to be used with Gigabit Ethernet, Sonet or ATM/Sonet networks.
Cross-connects premature?
The metro DWDM nodes can be used in point-to-point, protected-ring, unprotected-ring, or tree topologies, with protection taking place at channel or path-switched fiber. Qeyton could move to true optical cross-connects within the system, though Batchellor said it may make sense to wait until active optical switching elements are more mature before adding cross-connects to Qeyton's product mix.
Lars Egnell, chief executive of Qeyton, said the company tries to stay protocol-neutral. But Qeyton has signed a joint-development pact with NetInsights for DTM product development, and has demonstrated DTM over DWDM with Dynarc at the spring NetWorld+Interop show.
The QS200 system will be launched with a single-channel collector satellite node, QS200-SN, for traffic aggregation, and the multichannel node, QS200-HN, for interoffice ring meshes and hub or gateway applications. There is no limit to the number of channels that can be carried on a single-mode fiber, other than the total power budget of the fiber. |
