When we hear these incredibly poor predictions from the visionaries
of our society:
is it any wonder that it is so difficult for the rest of us to
keep up with rate of change going on today in telecommunications?
PTI commits to update this page periodically with current news
and insights related to technology, convergence issues, and evolving
business models driving change in the Telecommunications industry
today. We invite your comments. Because this is our maiden edition,
we will start with some historical perspective.
Harry Newton reminds us in the preface of Newton’s Telecom
Dictionary that only ten years ago, the telecom industry
was entirely closed. Every manufacturer had its own set of proprietary
standards. It was not possible to connect a Siemens phone to
an Ericsson switch or a Lucent phone to a Nortel PBX.
A persevering bunch of pioneers, coming chiefly from the computer
industry, pushed the telecommunications industry into open standards.
These standards bodies - the ATM Forum, the 
ECTF,
GO-MVIP, ITU-T, ANSI, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and
others - defined everything from telecom operating systems......
- to busses
that carry voice inside and outside of PCs;
- to cheap
ways of encoding voice digitally;
- to high-speed
lines;
- to telecom
"building block" software (called application generators);
and
- of course,
to IP telephony.
The result is that we can build new products, Lego-style. The
effects of these actions offer lower prices, fewer barriers
to entry, and faster creation of new products. In his comparison
of the evolution in switching hardware to that of the mainframe
to the client-server PC, Mr. Newton goes on to say - "We
are very close to the 'central office inside the PC'. As competition
and new technology arrive, the time to market new telecom features
will drop from three years to three weeks."
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their
home." --Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital
Equipment Corp.,1977.
No one could foresee the demand. Communications traffic is
exploding — wired and wireless. Data and voice. Traffic
on the Internet is doubling every 100 days.
We have seen worldwide deregulation of the telecommunications
industry. Governments everywhere have awakened to two powerful
realizations: First, globalization is the most powerful economic
force in the world today. Ignore it at your peril. Second, telecom
is economic infrastructure. Companies and business go where
globalization is friendliest and infrastructure is strongest.
No other industry is creating as many opportunities as telecommunications.
Each year in the May issue of Telecommunications,
the feature article is "The 10 Hottest Technologies".
In 1999, three fiber optic technologies made the list —
Metro DWDM, Optical Switching, and OC-768 SONET.
RHK, a market research and consulting firm specializing in
the analysis of advanced technologies for the public telecommunications
network, predicted in the segment on OC-768 that the technology
would not be deployed prior to 2002. In the same piece, it was
also noted that a Communications Industry Researcher’s report
on SONET cited the technology’s 100-km distance limitation,
speculating that OC-768 would therefore be limited to metropolitan
applications. Major breakthroughs in optical amplifier and regeneration
would perhaps push the technology to 200 km.
It was especially exciting to read the Qwest/Nortel press releases
on June 6 announcing their successful network trial (an industry
first) to carry live commercial traffic at speeds four times
faster than any existing commercial network over the longest
distance to date -- 435 miles (700 kilometers). OC-768 is 40
Gigabits per second.
In another first, the trial successfully combined four, 40Gbps
signals using Dense-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM)
to operate at a total capacity of 160Gbps, while maintaining
the same performance standards of Qwest's commercially-available
network. Qwest expects to begin widespread deployment of OC-768
technology in the first quarter of 2001.
Fiber optic technology is moving very fast. In the May, 2000
issue of Telecommunications, five more
fiber optic technologies made "The 10 Hottest Technologies"
list:
Solition:
Solitions are pulses of light that keep their shape, even after
colliding with one another. Although not without controversy,
some vendors are convinced that solition DWDM systems will solve
the problem of chromatic dispersion, or the broadening of a
pulse of light. They are looking to solitions to build the next
generation of DWDMs that can operate over longer distances and
provide higher-capacity channels. Beta versions will be tested
by the end of this year.
Passive Optical Networks (Pons):
The potential of the Internet remains tied to solving the issue
of the last-mile bottleneck.
A PON consists of an Optical Line Terminal (OLT) at the Central
Office (CO) or Point of Presence (POP), and an Optical Network
Terminal (ONT) located on or near the subscriber. The ONT provides
the various service interfaces, such as Ethernet or DS1, to
users. In the downstream path, a passive optical coupler, which
can be located anywhere between the OLT and ONT, slices the
light to serve as many as 32 end points and, in the upstream
direction, combines the light. Some couplers might split the
optical power evenly. Others might do a directional split where,
90 percent of the power goes down one path and 10 percent goes
down a second.
The Full Services Access Network (FSAN) consortium is creating
a comprehensive PON standard. So far, the group has decided
to use ATM as the transport technology in the PON (this format
is the ITU G.983 standard.)
The beauty of a PON is that there are no active components
between the CO and the customer’s location; hence, there is
no requirement for power or maintenance.
Today a PON network splits the light to provide services to
multiple customers. But as DWDM technology moves beyond the
network core and into the metro, a PON could prove equally adept
at delivering an entire wavelength to a customer. In the near
term, a PON could also complement the rollout of DSL services.
Tunable Lasers:
The Telecommunications article predicts that
tunable lasers may become the crown jewel in the all-optical
network’s treasure chest. While multichannel DWDM systems have
pushed fiber’s capacity to transmit multiple wavelengths, the
necessary cost of replacing or keeping spare fixed lasers is
becoming unattractive. With a tunable laser, carriers will only
need to tune to the appropriate DWDM wavelength and insert a
card instead of using a transmitter for each wavelength.
Several traditional and upstart vendors, such as Agility Telecom,
Agilent Technologies, Altitun, Bandwidth9, CoreTek (recently
acquired by Nortel), Fujitsu, Lucent and NTT have been working
to develop a cost-effective, tunable laser solution, and they
are beginning to make good on their promises. Like any emerging
technology, vendors have already begun to debate the best tuning
method. Currently, there are four:
- Distributed
Feedback Lasers (DFBs)
- Distributed
Bragg Reflector (DBR)
- MEMS
(Microelectromechanical Switches)
- Temperature
variation
These sound a bit like "smoke and mirrors" to me.
The analysts all agree that the potential for tunable lasers
is real. However, they are quick to point out that vendors need
to develop solutions that are at least the same price or lower
than that of fixed-wavelength lasers.
Optical Domain Service Interconnect
(ODSI):
ODSI will provide an intelligent method for optical components
to communicate with their electronic counterparts. Pioneered
by optical switch start-up Sycamore Networks, ODSI was formed
in conjunction with a group of 50 service providers and optical
switch vendors.
Its primary goal is to define a practical framework for interoperability
between electrical devices such as IP routers and ATM switches
to make bandwidth requests directly to an optical network via
optical switches.
By bringing immediate momentum to the issue of interoperability
at the electro-optical boundary, early supporters of ODSI will
be able to more effectively architect their multivendor networks
to support the demand for more bandwidth and high-speed services.
ODSI will enable automatic provisioning of bandwidth for IP
networks. It also has applications that go well beyond IP and
other types of provisioning, such as interoperability between
transport networks and being able to provision end-to-end circuits
across different mesh networks. One of the big initiatives is
to build a meshed network with Quality of Service (QoS).
Analysts agree that the gigabit/terabit switch router vendors
participating in ODSI are headed in the right direction to drive
efficiencies in the optical access layer. If ODSI is successful,
it could be implemented by the major manufacturers of core IP
routers, ATM switches, and optical switch vendors. ODSI interoperability
trials are expected to begin in the fall.
Very-Short-Range Optics:
Service providers are currently paying for SONET transport
designed to reach up to 500 km when, in some cases, they really
only need to cover 200 to 300 meters. Very-Short-Range (VSR)
optics, a SONET-framed interface that relies on parallel optic
technology and serves as a replacement to expensive serial interconnects,
will help service providers cost-effectively address customers’
demands for intra-POP transport beginning at OC-192. The technology
may displace traditional serial single-laser interfaces with
an array of 12 lasers. The laser array is fabricated onto a
single chip, which amounts to the same cost as packaging one
single-wavelength laser; service providers pay one-twelfth the
cost of packaging and receive 12 times the capacity. From this
converter chip, the signal is mapped over twelve 1.25-Gbps fiber
links, recombined and transmitted out at 10 Gbps. The technology
is an ideal transport for router-to-router, router-to-DWDM terminal,
or router-to-Optical Cross-Connect (OXC) distances.
Cisco and Ciena are working on VSR optical solutions and have
announced interoperability. Andy McCormick of the Aberdeen Group
expects vendors, including Xros (bought by Nortel), BrightLink
(formerly Corvia), Sycamore and Tellium, to add VSR optics as
a natural extension to their offerings. "The demand for
VSR optics is growing because ASPs need to interconnect to carriers’
networks in data…" Said McCormick.
The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) voted on a draft standard
last month. McCormick predicts VSR optical products will not
be available until Q2 2001.
