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Technology Stocks : TLAB info? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Dickerson who wrote (4037)	10/8/1998 2:22:00 PM
From: Jay Rommel	Respond to of 7342

110 points turnaround in the DOW in 10 minutes. What's going on? The DOW utilies is even now leading the way. a surge of buying in TLAB also ;-)

To: Dave Dickerson who wrote (4037)	10/9/1998 10:56:00 AM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7342

thought the board might appreciate this piece on optical cross-connects. culled from the "last mile technologies" board; posted by denvertechie. ----- A pertinent article in the Sept. 15 issue of America's Network page S10 (optical networking supplement) addresses [optical cross-connects] quite well. Below is a synopsis. The vision for optical cross-connects (OXCs) is a bit less certain than for optical add/drop multiplexers (OADMs), at least in the near term. The market for digital cross-connects took off when carriers began offering DS1 and DS3 services to customers. Broad based customer demand for DS3 is only now emerging as a mature market. That same factor likely will drive demand for OXCs. When optical wavelength is offered to customers, demand for OXCs will kick in. Consider that 2 years ago, an optical pipe for Bellcore was quoted by Bell Atlantic at $1 million per month. Now, with 64 wavelengths on a fiber and 10 Gbps bandwidth, Bell Atlantic could offer the same optical bandwidth for $20,000 a month. The gross price may have dropped , but it's still going to be some time before the industry sees the kind of mass demand which will drive the need for OXC mass deployment. In the meantime, manufacturers still feel the need to continue developing product, and with good reason: "you have to be there from the start. Photonics is one market area you just can't jump into." says Fujitsu. OXCs promise carriers great efficiencies by exploiting the optical layer. These systems are being designed to provide bit rate and protocol transparency, as well as non-blocking cross-connection. The successful OXC will be capable of modular growth, provide high-speed switching and high-speed optical path restoration, have low insertion loss, and offer extras such as optical fault detection, path trace, and Q monitoring. "Commercialization is limited by optical switch matrix technology" according to Siemens. To gain the benefit of efficiencies in an OXC, the size of the matrix has to be large - around 1,000 by 1,000 ports. Most manufacturers begin by working on smaller matrices like 256 x 256 hoping to understand them and then build larger ones like 1000 x 1000. Siemens feels larger OXCs won't be commercially available until after 2000. "Optical cross-connects definitely are part of the evolution in the optical layer" says NEC America. They expect OADMs to pick up steam this year with add/drop capacity. Ring capability is planned for 1999, then network managers will want to connect rings. It is this final part which will give OXCs a legit role in the network. NEC says those out there today are not integrated. Ericsson advises buyers to make sure they are looking at "true" OXCs which look at any wavelength and switch it from one frequency to another and not mere digital cross-connects with optical interfaces (Side Note: as in the Tellabs TITAN DCS with optical interfaces). However, both NEC and Ericsson agree that digital cross-connects and optical cross-connects can co-exist, because they reside on different parts of the network. Carriers likely will groom the digital domain before placing data onto the optical network. As we move to larger optical networks, we will do grooming in the optical layer and sub-grooming at the digital level. (Side Note: this explains Tellabs' insistence that optical network does not obsolete their TITAN product for the foreseeable future and I agree). With demand low and technology cost high, no one is setting rollout deadlines for OXCs until the LECs resolve their economic issues and have a firm handle on customer demand. Ericsson, for their part, says commercial availability is at least 24 months out.