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

To: George Dawson who wrote (1055)	12/6/1997 1:15:00 PM
From: Cytokine1	Respond to of 12623

Gosh, you are straining my technical understanding. Ciena mentions something about "open architecture" for their products. CIEN claims the MultiWave 1600 Terminal features "bit rate and protocol independent operation--SONET (SDH): 150 Mb/s to 2.5 Gb/s and Asynch (PDH): NRZ 50 Mb/s to 1.7 Gb/s and RZ 50 Mb/s to 1.2 Gb/s" and "multiplexes 16 channels of various bit rates--SONET (SDH) and Asinch (PDH)--up to 40 Gb/s." While my understanding of all this is rather limited, it sounds like the terminal can "accept" different protocols. It seems like a feature that all manufacturers would want. I wonder about the offerings from Nortel and Lucent. One thing I find useful about analysts' research reports is that they usually have research on size of markets, and sales projections. I don't have access to any such reports on CIEN.

To: George Dawson who wrote (1055)	12/6/1997 11:03:00 PM
From: Tim Bagwell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12623

George, almost all DWDM systems being considered today operate on the optical layer. That is to say, they do not intercept the actual data being transmitted. Only optical signals (light) are being manipulated at this level of the system. Ciena uses a process called "regeneration" whereby the incoming data is stripped from its optical carrier and then re-transmitted on another optical carrier. In this process, the data is not intercepted except to rebroadcast it down another carrier. This is what makes the system protocol independant since the system simply re-transmits what data comes in. The regeneration process does have an upper limit on bit rate but it is independant of bit rates below that limit. There has been some talk about inserting an "optical layer" which would be some kind of protocol that would ride on top of the framing protocol. This would allow routing to be done at the optical level instead of at the data level. However, this is not being done in todays networks. So I believe all WDM systems will posess this protocol independance.