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To: Greg h2o who wrote (19726)	3/23/2000 9:22:00 AM
From: Greg h2o	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

even better topical reading: Riding the metro--away from DWDM Miller, Elizabeth Starr Telephony (Chicago) Vol. 238 Issue 10 Mar 6, 2000 SOURCE TYPE: PERIODICAL PM_ID: 28303 ISSN: 00402656 Ciena, Kestrel introduce metropolitan optical networking products As metropolitan area networks feel the crunch of increased traffic and demand for more bandwidth, service providers are looking to deliver the capacity customers need without the expense and maintenance involved in using dense wave division multiplexing. According to Pioneer Consulting, the U.S. metro market is now worth $234 million and could grow to $1.2 billion by 2004. Equipment providers, such as Ciena. and start-up Kestrel Solutions, are looking for niches in the metro space and also addressing carrier concerns of scalability. To that end, Ciena last week launched its MultiWave Metro One as an entry-level version of its MultiWave Metro optical transport solution, which allows carriers to deliver wavelengths directly to the customer premises. Placed at a colocation site or in a large customer site, "it can drop any wavelength at any location," said Tom Mock, director of product marketing for Ciena. Metro One also allows carriers to provide various services, including Sonet, ATM, IP and gigabit Ethernet, at multiple speeds on a single fiber, he said. Each Metro One connects via a fiber ring from its remote location to the central office (CO) and into Ciena's MultiWave Metro. As demand for bandwidth increases, Metro One can scale up to 10 Gb/s, Mock said. The Metro product has 24 channels and scales up to 10 Gb/s per channel. "Carriers can take existing Sonet infrastructure and build new services on top using the same fiber facilities," Mock said. MCI WorldCom already has deployed the Metro One product on its network rings in London and Paris, where the carrier runs a variety of traffic types, including Sonet and gigabit Ethernet, Mock added. "If you can run native protocols over one optical wavelength, it simplifies the interfaces and management," said Michael Arellano, an analyst for Degas Communications Group, referring to Metro One's ability to support a variety of data traffic types. Kestrel's TalonMX product fills another need in the metro market. The TalonMX, sits at the CO and distinguishes itself through a new technology the company calls optical frame division multiplexing (FDM), which allows carriers to send up to 10 Gb/s of bandwidth over a single fiber. The product addresses carrier demands for scalability, ease of operation and ease of engineering, said Dawn Hogh, vice president of marketing for Kestrel. "We looked at DWDM, but found it couldn't meet carrier's requirements." Optical FDM is a multiplexing technique that transports multiple optical signals on a single wavelength by first converting optical signals to electrical and modulating them into one signal. It then switches the one signal back to the optical layer as one 10 Gb/s wavelength. By converting to electrical at every node, the system allows for performance monitoring, Hogh said. According to Kestrel, the TalonMX operates over any type of fiber. Built with the RBOCs in mind, it can handle polarization mode dispersion (PMD). When older fiber flattens out and cannot support OC-192, Hogh said. "Bell Atlantic says 70% of its fiber in the northeast corridor can't support OC-192 because of PMD," she added. "The Talon accounts for PMD so carriers can put labor costs [normally spent on laying new fiber] toward turning up services instead." While the Metro One and TalonMX address the increasing demands of metro networks, the TalonMX also solves a slightly different problem, Arellano said. It fits in where "a carrier needs to increase the capacity of existing fiber but the fiber is not high enough quality to handle DWDM," he said.