Mark a good article on the huge move that will be made over the next 12 months into MetroDWDM. The only company supplying systems right now is HLIT. Look out for LUcy,Cien/CSCO,and NT/BAY,but HLIT is the one supplying TCOMA right now. The key is the cost,and tunability of the EDFA's. Right now,the thing stopping HLIT,and others from 32 wavelength MetroDWDM is the cost of these amplifiers.
But even as this trend is just starting to build, a new wave of applications is following close behind, involving DWDM at the metro level, in conjunction with more advanced trafficking capabilities in the optical domain.
"Although the metro market has been slow to adopt DWDM, we believe that 1999 will be the start of a tremendous market upswing," said Ken Lewis, senior vice president of the transmission division at Alcatel Telecom's Alcatel USA unit.
Fujitsu last week began demonstrating an "eight-by-eight" DWDM metro-fiber system, delivering eight OC-48 channels in each direction over a single, unamplified fiber.
By mid-1999, the company plans to introduce a dynamic add/drop multiplexer, which will allow its unidirectional, DWDM-metro system to evolve into an all-optical ring, Jaggi said.
Cisco has already begun supplying routers with lower-speed optical outputs suitable for long-reach interfaces of under 80 kilometers in the MAN (metro-area network) environment, Bates said.
"Later, we'll add long-reach interfaces at OC-48, allowing the router to drive the fiber directly at that rate," he added.
Over time, this will support direct integration of services into the optical layer. "It doesn't make much sense to integrate full WDM into the router at this point, given the cost of finely tuned lasers, but this will change with the advent of truly tunable lasers," Bates said.
multichannel.com
Tim |
