>>Companies like Mayan Networks, LuxN, Astral Point, and Quantum Bridge. They're throwing electronics at the problem, collapsing everything together to improve the connection between local area networks and the backbone.<<
Thanks J for the Saturday morning reading. A little bit more about Mayan Networks, Astral Point & Quantum Bridge.
Startup fever follows bandwidth boom
mayannetworks.com
By Loring Wirbel and Craig Matsumoto
EE Times
(11/05/99, 4:33 p.m. EDT)
ARLINGTON, Va. ? Predicting a long boom in the communications industry, keynoters and attendees at this past week's Next Generation Networks conference pointed to a sector flush with venture capital that's fueling a new round of companies angling to innovate.
At least 10 significant startups tipped plans that range from specialized communication-processor silicon to hybrid optical systems for cross-connect and add-drop mux systems in metropolitan carrier networks. Meanwhile, PC giant Intel Corp. opened a venture fund aimed squarely at backing optical networks.
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Astral Point Communications Inc. (Chelmsford, Mass.) also is looking at metropolitan-area transport for new optical transmission systems. The company, founded by Raj Shanmugaraj of PictureTel and Bruce Miller of Bay Networks, has pulled in $24 million in venture funding.
Mayan Networks Inc., with a strong management team from 3Com and Raynet led by Daniel Gatti, has pulled in a total of $90 million in funding to develop the Unifier, an edge aggregrator that can route, switch and combine any mix of time-division multiplexing and ATM service down to DS-0 granularity and can interface directly to carrier-class optical equipment.
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Several speakers, including McQuillan and Gerald Butters, group president for optical networks at Lucent Technologies Inc., warned that end-to-end optical switching is still a few years away from true implementation. In the meantime, the expansion of first-generation optical wave division multiplexing (WDM) equipment with electronically switched optical add-drop muxes and optical cross-connects will allow carrier backbones at metro, national and global levels to move to unprecedented levels of capacity.
Butters said optical capacity growth is only in the early stages of expansion. He said it's feasible that single-fiber WDM capacity will exceed 1,000 channels in the near future, with total throughput of 3.2 terabits/second. That "puts us in the holy grail space," he said.
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Interesting points on Software and Hardware Scaling and Reliability. .
Beyond optical, the role of software also took center stage in several NGN sessions on Internet scaling. New ASICs alone aren't enough, said John W. Stewart, marketing engineer for Juniper Networks; "to actually take [an ASIC] and do packet forwarding, you'd have to write a lot of software." Expansion of Internet bandwidth is "pushing the envelope of physics and computer architecture," Stewart said.
"Building software that scales is a mystery, in terms of scaling to the tens, twenties, and hundreds of terabits [per second] people are talking about," said Derek Oppen, vice president of carrier router product management for Nortel Networks.
Juniper's Stewart added that "even if you can put enough gates on a chip to perform certain functions, you have to get enough information in and out of the chip to operate on. That's going to be a limit before the number of gates is a limit."
Reliability is another issue, as data networks improve their up-times to match the quality of the telephone system. "We have to look at every single packet at line rate," said Jeff Wabik, chief architect of IP switching products at Lucent. "If you miss just one, it could be the packet that's initiating a 911 call."
But at the 10-Gbit/second rates likely to be used in the network core next year that means examining one packet every 4 millionths of a second, Wabik said. ASICs might be able to handle that speed, but software can't.
Quantum Bridge - Slicing the Wave
The key enabler to the Quantum Bridge solution is the innovative Dynamic Wavelength SlicingTM (DWS) protocol (patent pending). Developed as a result of Quantum Bridge's rich optical networking expertise, DWS allows individual wavelengths to be "sliced" or shared among many end users or business customers. Just as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has expanded the capacity of a single fiber, DWS expands the capacity and number of terminations that can be served over a given wavelength. As such, service providers can allocate the desired bandwidth within a given wavelength to each customer to efficiently utilize fiber resources. Additionally, DWS is protocol independent, supporting both ATM and IP. As a result, DWS provides a multi-wavelength, multi-customer, multi-protocol solution that is poised to change the way next-generation access networks are architected. |
