Start-up's fiber gear could slash T-1 prices

NORTH ANDOVER, MASS. - Start-up Quantum Bridge is readying equipment that could enable carriers to deliver T-1 lines over fiber optic lines for half the price of typical T-1s.

By eliminating the need for expensive electronics on the fiber that runs from the service provider network to customer sites, Quantum Bridge cuts carrier equipment costs 90% - enough to bring about dramatic price cuts, says Tony Zona, Quantum Bridge's CEO.

Using his company's equipment, carriers should be able to offer T-1s for $300 per month and still be able to pay off the Quantum Bridge gear within 18 months, he says.

The alternative to the company's passive optical networking technology is SONET, a technology Zona and Quantum Bridge co-founder Jeff Gwynne worked on together at Bell Labs and Lucent. But SONET requires multiplexers at every junction. Quantum Bridge equipment eliminates the need for SONET gear and uses passive optical splitters and couplers instead.

Using Quantum Bridge's gear, carriers should be able to offer services between the 1.5M bit/sec of a T-1 and the 45M bit/sec of a T-3, says Rosemary Cochran, an analyst with Vertical Systems Group in Dedham, Mass. If a customer needs more bandwidth, the carrier can boost that customer's share of a wavelength via management software alone.

The technology seems particularly well-suited to transparent LAN services in which WAN connections run at full LAN speed, Cochran says. Quantum Bridge is the only company she knows of that is working on this type of gear.

The alternative to fiber distribution is installing a network of SONET multiplexers that are much more expensive, Cochran says.

Quantum Bridge is building two pieces of equipment: An op-tical access switch transmits and re-ceives light signals at the carrier switching office. And customer-site gear, called an intelligent optical terminal, puts customer traffic on and takes it off the fiber.

The optical signal is sent from the switch on a single fiber, and that signal can be split onto other fibers, like branches of a tree, using passive optical couplers. This lets a single light signal reach many customers.

The company will announce pricing in January, and the equipment will be available sometime before mid-2000. It will go into beta testing with carriers at year-end.

Quantum Bridge: www. quantumbridge.com