Corvis brightens Broadwing
Eighteen months ago, Broadwing was a humdrum combination of a solid RBOC (Cincinnati Bell) and a modestly sized next generation long haul network, IXC, running 3 OC-192s of Nortel backbone capacity with Level 3 (LVLT) as its biggest customer. (Jim Crowe was still deep in the trenches with his 12 conduits.) Seeking an edge, says Chris Rothlis, VP of engineering, the company looked at ultra-long-haul technology bubbling up from the labs, and saw—lots of bubbles. But beneath the froth was David Huber’s Corvis team promising that by employing Raman amplification, forward error correction, and a few other tricks, Corvis could send lambdas thousands of kilometers without electronic regenerators. Moreover, its super secret all-optical cross connect would suck all the SONET add-drop switches out of the core of the network to boot, cutting capital costs by half compared to a Nortel SONET network. After deploying the 10,500 mile system in three large loops this spring, Broadwing found that Huber was wrong: Corvis actually beat the SONET price by 75 percent. Broadwing’s cap-ex savings may have amounted to more than $400 million.
Not to mention the snow shovels: last winter, Broadwing teams in the Midwest sent out to upgrade or repair circuits first had to remove the snow from the regenerator huts. Not this winter. On a coast-to-coast link, just four line cards are needed to bring up an additional Corvis WDM lambda versus installing 48 O-E-O interfaces, requiring dozens of truck rolls to light a traditional SONET circuit over the same distance. Thus, along with SONET vanishes most of the labor for upgrades and repairs, ultimately adding up, Rothlis hopes, to an even bigger savings on operations (op-ex) than on cap-ex. Op-ex accounts for 70 percent of a carrier’s budget on average.
Cutting provisioning times for a new channel from months to weeks or days has allowed Broadwing, almost uniquely in the industry, to sell “Service Level Agreements,” money back guarantees essentially, on how quickly it can set up new circuits for customers. Industry surveys show the one thing customers most want from their carriers is the ability to add new circuits in days not months. But because a SONET network requires such an elaborate electronic build out for each lambda lit, SONET carriers traditionally deploy capacity first and then sell it, which means guessing where the demand will be. When the international Canadian carrier Teleglobe recently hit the bandwidth market looking for more than a quarter of a terabit in the typically underbuilt Southeast U.S., quickly, the SONET networks could offer nothing for the better part of a year. Broadwing lit 38 OC-192 circuits for Teleglobe in 45 days. Williams, also a Corvis customer and Teleglobe supplier, deployed four coast-to-coast lambdas for Teleglobe in 11 days, and this month lit a 10 gigabit lambda between New York and Washington, DC, in 48 hours. |
