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

To: Tim Bagwell who wrote (1057)	12/7/1997 1:32:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Respond to of 12623

Tim, Thanks a lot. I have been asking a lot of people about this and I appreciate your response. I am surprised by the number of people who could not give me a straight answer. George D.

To: Tim Bagwell who wrote (1057)	12/8/1997 1:29:00 AM
From: Geof Hollingsworth	Respond to of 12623

Hi Tim, I agreed with everything in your post until the last sentence, which I think leaves the wrong impression. There is a big architectural difference between the systems marketed by the vendors with their own SONET terminals (like Nortel), which employ a closed architecture, and those from vendors like Cienna who, of necessity, have to work with other people's terminals since they have none of their own. The Nortel architecture works only with thier terminals, integrating the electornics and the optics. Each strand of their current high-end product carries 8 color OC192 on 48 strands (full duplex, redundant terabit capacity). This is a very efficient architecture for new construction, and they are doing very well with it by all accounts (they are the ones supplying Qwest, for example). Cienna and other open-architecture vendors put the active electronics inside the WDM box, so you can do management at a different layer than SONET (but don't have to). This architecture allows for a network to mix OC rates, and also allows for non-SONET protocols (IP, ATM). The key word is allows; there is a lot of work to be done to make it happen, including the need to provide the same sort of ring protection switching which SONET provides. This is a more complex solution than the Nortel approach, but it is also more flexible. Whether the flexibility offsets the complexity will depend on the application, and I believe it is not clear that all WDM systems will posess protocol independence (unless it becomes essentially free, which it isn't today).

To: Tim Bagwell who wrote (1057)	12/9/1997 8:24:00 PM
From: Doug	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12623

Hi Tim: I am a newbie to this thread and at the start of my learning run. I have the following questions regards understanding the technology a: What is the diff between WDM and DWDM. in terms of channels,input loss and cross_talk noise limits, etc.?. Does the optical splitter technology determine the maximum allowable density per channel. b: If there are no IP Optical or Electronic switches does the transmission Protocol encapsulate the original Protocol for each cell. c: Does the protocol require an address for each frame or can long transmissions be tagged to avoid repetition. d: Which is the more complex end of the technology, muxing/demuxing or integration and routing of hardwire protocols on a fibre backbone.