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Technology Stocks : Ciena (CIEN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Fulop who wrote (10440)	2/17/2001 11:59:06 PM
From: jghutchison	Respond to of 12623

James, At first blush one would tend to think that the authors of that report were none other than Pat Nettles and Gary Smith. But those who have done their dd know better. Three billion of OEO switchgear sounds nice to me. Ciena should easily capture half that market. That's my bet. Same for the K2 penetration into the second generation SONET edge access market, with equal opportunity there. Add that base to Ciena's existing DWDM bread and butter and you have a feast. I still continue to believe Ciena's management is playing it conservatively. That upside guidance only shows the tip of the iceberg. There is much more underneath. Bet on it. Jack Hutchison

To: James Fulop who wrote (10440)	2/19/2001 10:49:55 AM
From: James Fulop	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12623

Since the CoreDirector and other optical switches (both o-e-o and o-o-o) have been highlighted both here and on other SI threads recently, I thought I'd take the opportunity to post this from a Lightreading article that came out a while back on optical switching fabrics... >>Right now, the optical switches being shipped by the likes of Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN - message board), Sycamore Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: SCMR - message board), and Tellium Inc. have electrical cores. Light pulses are converted back into electrical signals so that their route across the middle of the switch can be handled by conventional ASICs (application specific integrated circuits). This has a lot of advantages, most notably in enabling the switches to handle smaller bandwidths than whole wavelengths, which fits in with current market requirements. The electrical cores also make managing networks easier, because standards are in place and products are available. Optical equivalents are not, at present. However, there are concerns that electrical cores won’t be able to cope with the explosion in the number of wavelengths in telecom networks, resulting from the deployment of DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing). Until recently, it’s looked as though state-of-the-art ASIC technology wouldn’t support anything more than a 512-by-512-port electrical core, and carriers have been saying they need at least double this capacity. In theory, all-optical switches -- ones that don’t convert light pulses back into electrical signals -- don’t suffer this limitation. A number of vendors -- including Calient Networks; OMM Inc.; Onix Microsytems Inc.; and Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT - message board), via its acquisition of Xros -- have announced plans for all-optical switches with more than 1,000 ports. (see Xros Launches First 1000-Port All Optical Cross Connect , Startup To Upstage Xros on All-Optical Switches , Startup Prepares Secret Switch and Calient Claims Breakthroughs On Optical Switches ) All-optical switches also promise to eliminate the need for repeated optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions in the network, saving carriers millions in both the network core and metro edge. On the current crop of core optical switches, the lion’s share of cost is associated with these OEO conversions, found in both interfaces and shelf-to-shelf interconnections. In addition, all-optical switches promise to make networks more future-proof. Carriers won’t have to upgrade equipment to support higher transmission speeds, so they’ll be able to take advantage of advances in technology more easily. That’s the theory. However, things are turning out a little different in practice. For a kickoff, vendors are finding ways of building larger scale electrical cores. Brightlink Networks Inc. says its switch will eventually scale to many thousands of ports (see Brightlink: My Switch Is Bigger Than Yours ). And just recently, Velio Communications Inc. announced some electrical switching fabric developments that could support cores of a similar scale (see Velio Claims Switch Silicon Breakthrough ). This may encourage carriers to put off decisions on moving to all-optical switches. All the same, this isn’t going to kill off the idea of all-optical networks. All that it might do is delay things, and that might be just as well. The folk developing fabric for all-optical switches have come a long way, but they’ve still got a long haul ahead of them to convince carriers to use their technologies.<< lightreading.com Full article starts on: "Optical Switching Fabric" lightreading.com