(edit)Hi Frank and all, haven't had much chance to partake here lately (have to make up that 'lost time' from vacation, which seems to defeat the whole purpose, but I digress)
On the GbTTH (gigabits to the home) topic, I'll leave you with these for now (most of this I'm sure you're aware of, but just to plant a few seeds):
-----------------
One giant leap home: FTTH standardization equates smaller costs to carriers.
Telephony, June 28, 1999 pNA
In a move to spur on standardized equipment for fiber to the home, several carriers have banded together to develop a common technical standard for optical network access systems. BellSouth, BT, France Telecom and NTT have formulated a common requirements specification to catalyze the deployment of optical networks to businesses and homes.
With optical fiber already established as the transmission of choice for intercontinental, intercity routes, point-to-point fiber and fiber rings, the carriers were faced with finding a way to reach the consumer and business markets more economically. By binding together, the carriers will be able to maximize market volume and minimize equipment cost, said Brian Ford, manager of exploratory services in BellSouth's science and technology division.
As part of the effort, the four carriers have been working with the Full Service Access Network initiative, a group of carriers trying to develop asynchronous transfer mode passive optical networks. With standardization, vendors will be able to build products based on what a majority of the carriers want, rather than individualizing each product, Ford said. In turn, by teaming up, carriers will be able to benefit from volume pricing.
"BellSouth would have had to buy a certain number of devices, and others would have to buy products that were just a little different," said Ford. But with the standardization, vendors can look at the quantity of product sold as a whole, reducing costs across the board.
-----------
CABLE, TELCOS SEE NEW FIBER ROLES.
Multichannel News, June 29, 1998 v19 n26 p107(1)
By Dawson, Fred
Growing consensus within the rival cable and telco camps about how they will move to broadband is inspiring suppliers to come up with fresh approaches to fiber distribution in local and regional networks.
On the telco side, unanimity among major local-exchange carriers in the United States and abroad on the use of ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) for end-to-end broadband connectivity is inspiring new initiatives at the interoffice level.
For example, telcos like BellSouth Corp. and Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. are taking new looks at dense wave-division multiplexing for the last mile in a new push for fiber-to-the-home solutions.
Meanwhile, in cable, a new trend toward the direct insertion of IP (Internet-protocol) packets from routers into SONET (synchronous optical network) multiplexers for high-speed backbone transport is inspiring thoughts of going one step further: adding SONET-like capabilities to the layer-3 domain of IP-packet management.
The foundation for the new BellSouth/NTT FTTH initiative, officials said, is agreement on the fundamental architecture for next-generation fiber-rich access networks within an international I carrier group - the Full Service Access Network initiative.
That architecture entails the delivery of ATM-formatted signals over fiber from central office or remote digital terminals to passive optical splitters, which distribute the signal into as many as 32 fibers for the final run of fiber to termination points known as optical network units. The signal speeds range from OC-3 (155 megabits per second) bidirectionally to OC-12 (622 mbps) downstream and OC-3 upstream.
This architecture can be applied in several configurations, said Hank Kafka, executive director at BellSouth's Advanced Technology and Systems Engineering Center. It uses time-division multiplexing at each GNU to extract the portion of the SONET OC signal meant for the user or users served by that connection.
These include:
* Fiber-to-the-node, where signals are sent over VDSL (very high-speed digital-subscriber-line) copper links at anywhere from 13 mbps to 25 mbps to customers, depending on the distance of the node from the premises;
* Fiber-to-the-curb, which is a deeper extension that uses VDSL to operate at up to 52 mbps; and
* FTTH, where the ONU is located at the customer premises.
In all cases, the design calls for single-fiber links, using two wavelengths (1310 nanometers and 1550 nm) to carry downstream and upstream signals over the same fiber.
"Basically, the way that we're approaching access technologies is to have a full set of tools that we can bring to bear in various situations, depending on what works best," Kafka said. "We expect that FTTH will prove in economically in a number of different applications."
Those include newbuild areas, where BellSouth has routinely been constructing FTTC systems for supply of voice services over the past several years, and possibly some rebuild situations, Kafka said. In addition, the company is considering FTTH as a video-transport overlay to existing copper, he noted.
"There is high interest within the industry overall in the FSAN architecture, but the focus on different versions varies from one company to the next," Kafka said. "Our initial focus is more on FTTH than on VDSL."
With NTT sharing that interest, BellSouth hopes that the pooling of efforts to resolve specific design issues that are unique to the FTTH aspects of the FSAN architecture, particularly at the OW, will lead to industrywide consensus on an FTTH model, Kafka said.
"The key aspect to getting costs down is to get volume up, which requires agreement on the specifics," he added.
NTT, which is already using the FSAN model for all-fiber systems serving business centers, has been informally sharing information with BellSouth for some time. Now, the two companies hope to test FSAN compliant FTTH systems starting next year, with the intention of making the technology commercially viable for deployments by 2001.
The FSAN initiative - which includes the six major U.S. LECs and eight other large telcos in Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia -- has made SONET a fundamental part of the architecture. Some suppliers, however, believe that the widespread concurrence on the use of ATM end-to-end opens an opportunity to dispense with the use of SONET multiplexers. This would occur by using the power of ATM protocols in conjunction with all-optical add/drop multiplexers to perform the optical-network configuration, restoration, monitoring and management tasks that are now assigned to SONET.
"Direct feed of ATM into the optical layer is something that we're taking a bard look at," said a senior executive at Bell Communications Research, which has been tapped to supply the system-integration software for Sprint Corp.'s new Interactive On-Demand Network (ION).
While Sprint's data-networking unit has begun deploying IP-over-SONET solutions, bypassing ATM altogether, the new ION architecture requires new thinking about how to exploit the costsavings potential of DWDM technology in the backbone, the Beilcore official said. The design tightly integrates IP-over-ATM in new edge switch/routers to be supplied by Cisco Systems Inc.
The first vendor to publicly tout such a solution is Ericsson Inc. The U.S. unit of the Swedish supplier recently demonstrated the concept of SONET-less long-haul WDM transport over a 650-kilometer link.
In this case, the packet format employed was Ethernet LAN (local-area network). Here, a gigabit Ethernet router directly fed the Ericsson Optical Networking (Erion) DWDM system. But the idea will work with ATM, frame relay and even IP, said Roselyne Genin, vice president of optical networks and transport solutions at Ericsson.
"What we've shown is that WDM can be a bridge to multiservice transport in native formats that gives carriers great flexibility in network configuration," Genin said. "We replace the restoration capabilities with the optical-layer protection and scaleable capacity provisioning that's built into the Erion system."
This approach uses optical add/drop multiplexers as access points to a ring architecture, where a wavelength segment of the ring can be flexibly shifted around through optical-amplifier toggling to create a "flexing bus" catch-all for any failure that might occur, she said.
Other vendors are looking at the native formats themselves - specifically IP and ATM - as the key to eliminating SONET, rather than relying solely on the protections afforded by solutions like Ericsson's. "SONET offers direct interface with network-management systems, as well as the optical-layer protection, which requires more than an optical-layer solution," said an executive at a leading competitor to Ericsson, who asked not to be named.
From a cable perspective, the possibility that IP could be developed to supplant the network-management components of SONET opens a route to much tighter integration of the high-speed-data architecture on an end-to-end basis.
"This is where some important synergies come into play that could benefit cable-data providers," said Karl May, vice president and general manager of broadband technology at Bay Networks Inc., which is set to be acquired by Nortel.
"Things like IP-over-SONET or ATM-over-SONET are continuations of a trend, and not the type of inflection point that we believe is possible in conjunction with the growing expansion of IP technology," May said. "We haven't reached the point of engineering a product yet, but we've been discussing internally the idea of what you could do if you had access to the DWDM technology that we will now have access to through the merger with Nortel."
May added, "There may be a lot of overhead in the intervening layers that we can get rid of. That would really be an inflection point in the evolution of network architecture."
-----------
and these links:
canet2.net (specifically, click on "Gigabit Internet to every Canadian Home by 2005" but there are other interesting links there also)
americasnetwork.com
americasnetwork.com
rr.cs.cmu.edu
rr.cs.cmu.edu
city.palo-alto.ca.us
Japan Telecom also had something in the oven, but I can't locate any links so maybe it "burned." Also haven't kept up on ClearWorks progress, or OpticalSolutions.
Oh, can't forget this:
I think this might just be the ultimate laser communications system<g>:
patent.womplex.ibm.com
However, I personally did this at least a decade before this patent was issued :(
dh |
