Cable industry gets hot on wave-division multiplexing. Wirbel article
pubs.cmpnet.com
By Loring Wirbel, Posted: 12:30 p.m., EST, 5/4/98
ATLANTA - Booming interest in wavelength
division multiplexing among broadband backbone
equipment suppliers is exemplified by the number
of WDM announcements at both the National
Cable Television Association's Cable '98
convention in Atlanta, and at the
NetWorld+Interop show being held in Las Vegas.
While a WDM theme had long been anticipated at
N+I, the NCTA show surprised observers with
several announcements and sessions Sunday and
Monday on using dense WDM in cable systems.
On Monday, Harmonic Lightwaves Inc.
(Sunnyvale, Calif.) introduced the MetroLink, the
first dense-WDM system optimized for hybrid
fiber/coaxial cable infrastructures. The WDM
equipment is installed directly in the headend.
Instead of dedicating each light channel to a single
data stream, as is the case in WDM equipment for
data, the Harmonic Lightwaves system multiplexes
a single digital video stream across multiple light
channels. Tele-Communications Inc. (Englewood,
Colo.) already has agreed to use MetroLink to
upgrade its Vancouver, Wash., network.
A special Monday WDM session was slated to
hear presentations on new systems from Antec
Corp. (Norcross, Ga.), working on an analog
WDM system; and ADC Broadband
Communications Inc. (Meridien, Conn.), which is
experimenting with dense WDM in both analog
and digital environments.
Two sources close to the hush-hush Cable
Broadband Forum, slated to be introduced
Monday afternoon, claimed that the new industry
association would endorse use of WDM to
increase the capacity of CATV nationwide
backbones, as well as relieve bottlenecks in
metropolitan networks. One charter member said
that "the forum will be looking at a variety of
standards and actions the industry can take,
operating on several layers in the stack, but you
can bet DWDM [dense WDM] will be an
important element here."
The interest at Cable '98 is particularly ironic, given that some analysts were considering that even N+I
was an odd forum to emphasize use of the optical
technology. Until the past year, advances in WDM
have largely come from the Optical Fibers
Conference and similar optocomponent symposia.
Only last year, the Supercomm show for
telecom-equipment OEMs began to get serious
about WDM, and all indications are that next
month's Supercomm in Atlanta will be dominated
by news of WDM.
But the more LAN-oriented N+I has adopted
WDM as an important metro-area access
technology, and the number of demos later this
week in Las Vegas will rival those shown Sunday
and Monday in Atlanta. Cisco Systems Inc. and
Ciena Corp. will be announcing the multivendor
Optical Interoperability Forum at a Las Vegas
Hilton meeting on Wednesday afternoon that will
concentrate on raising awareness of WDM and
generating common standards.
Meanwhile, WDM system manufacturer Cambrian
Systems Corp. (Kanata, Ontario) will be showing
demos on the N+I show floor of how WDM can
coexist with Gigabit Ethernet. Cambrian's DWDM
OPTera TM (Optical Protocol Independent
Transport era) will be linked directly to the 3Com
SuperStack II Switch 9300, the Accelar 1200
Routing Switch from Bay Networks Inc. and the
PowerRail 5200 Enterprise Routing Switch from
Packet Engines Inc.
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