Frank, Mike - A leap over existing infrastructure?
Optics in action
By Paul Gannon
Scandinavian carrier Utfors is already taking Ethernet and optics all the way to the customer's premises. Could this be one model for the future?
Optical and data networking technologies are starting to converge, opening the way for innovative wide area networking architectures and new business opportunities.
The prize for carriers and their customers will come from being able to offer multiple service level agreements from the same network, with service, network management, and routing, all handled at the optical layer.
This, say proponents, should not only reduce costs, but also offer flexibility in deploying and managing services.
Gigabit Ethernet stands at the core of one such venture, in a new network concept being deployed by Scandinavian carrier Utfors (Stockholm). The company will offer native IP ports to corporates and Internet service providers across Scandinavia - via optical fibers - from their local area networks linked to a central gigabit Ethernet switch. The switch which will act as a virtual private network (VPN) service delivery device, as well as an Internet and voice network access device, at the center of an intelligent optical network.
"With a state-of-the-art optical networking platform and a sophisticated software architecture we will be able to respond quickly to our customers' needs in provisioning new services on demand," said Sten Nordell, chief technical officer at Utfors. Users will have always-on connections which can be used for data VPN access as well as voice traffic.
Utfors will use SN8000 and SN16000 optical networking equipment supplied by Sycamore Networks Inc. (Chelmsford, Massachusetts) to manage its 4,500-kilometer fiber optic network covering Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
The voice services will be delivered through what RAD (Israel), which is providing the customer equipment, defines as "classic telephony over IP". Its IPmux will sit between business customers' PBXs and the Ethernet access pipes, and will convert E1/T1 voice and data streams into packets.
Because of the huge bandwidth capacity in the access pipe, Utfors customers can keep all their PBX features as the 'conventional' voice protocols ride across the Ethernet access transparently.
"This is a first of its kind: gigabit Ethernet on WDM (wavelength division multiplexing)," said Desh Deshpande, chairman and founder of Sycamore Networks. "The incumbents will have a hard time beating this sort of thing because at the end of the day it's a software game that we're in."
However, such architectures have yet to be proven in serious action.
So far carriers have limited gigabit Ethernet to LAN or metropolitan area network (MAN) transmissions both because of low current demand and because of the novelty of handling gigabit Ethernet over a WAN.
Andrew Palmer, managing director, EMEA, at gigabit Ethernet switch supplier, Foundry Networks (Sunnyvale, California), questions whether gigabit Ethernet is ready to be used in the WAN. "The question is whether, when it is built, it will work or not. We have to deliver with real world technology, today, which currently means IP-over-Sonet which is easily scalable. Gigabit Ethernet is not the only game."
Utfors' innovation is to take a data protocol usually regarded as a LAN or MAN platform, extend it over national and international scale, and then build an architecture for converged service delivery from that protocol, effectively disregarding the traditional approach of using WAN protocols such as SDH and IP-over-Sonet.
"With the Utfors service there is no per-minute charge for voice within a corporation connected with IP ports," said Nordell. "Also, we can deliver as much as 25 times the capacity for the same price as our competitors charge just for Internet access. With our network we can give the customer a 100Mb IP port, including Internet access, VPN and traditional voice, for less than US$5,000 per month," he said.
Utfors is able to deploy this architecture by transferring a lot of the WAN network functionality to intelligent devices in the optical network, to provide bandwidth management, recovery and network management. The gigabit Ethernet switch then only has to handle IP connectivity.
Initially there will be just one gigabit Ethernet switch at the center of the network, but as traffic grows the architecture should allow for a meshed gigabit Ethernet core to be built up.
Gigabit Ethernet is usually limited to connections up to about 50 kilometers, but there is no reason why optical network management systems cannot be used to extend the signals over long-haul networks, with the signals traveling very great distances before regeneration. Already, optical equipment vendors such as Ciena Corp. (Baltimore, Maryland) and Siemens AG (Munich) have proved the concept by transmitting gigabit Ethernet over thousands of kilometers.
totaltele.com |
