Chris--
Actually, Ciena is in the thick of it all in the metro arena. Currently, all of Ciena's dwdm products are configured for point to point communication, but for metro applications the prefered topology is a ring or mesh rather than point to point to point to ... However, the article was describing how GST "jury-rigged" some of Ciena's equipment to make a metro mesh network. What I really liked to hear is how they plan to put a Ciena FireFly unit in the basement of each building, give each customer in the building a wavelength, and have the building's total communications coming out on one fiber. Then they plan to combine that with the rest of the metro communication with Ciena's soon to arrive multiplexers. So the market then includes a DWDM unit in every building or every block of a city--that's a lot of equipment!
Of course, this can be done with any metro DWDM product, not just Ciena's. So far, only Nortel, Tellium, and Osicom (ever heard of them?) are shipping metro products, while Ciena is slated 2Q99, Lucent is slated for 4Q99 (more vaporware!), and NEC, Ericsson, Fujitsu, NEC, Alcatel, etc. are also coming soon.
That's a good article, worth going back and re-reading.
Oliver |
