Equal bandwidth opportunity for all

By Atul Kapoor
Network World, 04/19/99

Some of the more interesting technologies and products shown last month at the NetEvents conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif., pertained to the core of the network infrastructure.

These technologies - terabit and wavelength routers, optical transport nodes and data-friendly dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) - enable service providers to deploy multiservice networks in a timely and dynamic manner. Central to most of these innovations is DWDM, which uses different frequencies of the light spectrum to carry signals.

Historically, network design in service provider nets has focused on managing bandwidth as a precious resource or grafting data over a voice-optimized infrastructure. The new technologies will result in a surplus of bandwidth and equal opportunity for voice, video and data, while some new products will focus on directing the surplus bandwidth where and when it is needed.

Some NetEvents vendor offerings enable service providers to provision new services quickly and reduce time to market. Other products focus on reducing the cost of the infrastructure by eliminating compulsory SONET usage and multiplexing multiple services directly onto DWDM devices. Still others would enable service providers to offer DWDM-based metropolitan services at gigabit rates.

The technical implication of these offerings is to render moot the arguments over whether ATM should be at the core for multiservice provisioning or whether IP can be directly transported over SONET - or with DWDM if SONET is necessary at all. The new products would protect existing investments in SONET and still allow the flexibility to take any signal type - IP data, ATM cells or SONET frames - and put it over DWDM.

An interesting point of the NetEvents discussions was whether the legacy telephone companies - which still have difficulty spelling the four-letter word "data" and seem to confuse incestuous mergers and acquisitions as a sign of progress - would take advantage of these emerging technologies and become more competitive. Bill Schrader, CEO of PSINet, a leading ISP, points out yet again that it would be only a matter of time before dominant carriers would become formerly dominant carriers.

The new technologies reconfirmed the ongoing trend of technological innovation being led by start-ups. With these products, you are more likely to hear names such as Sycamore Networks, Monterey Networks, Ciena and Juniper Networks than Cisco, 3Com, Lucent and Nortel Networks. Some of the big boys claim to have innovations, but none shared future products at NetEvents.

Perhaps some of these smaller companies will become the real leaders of DWDM.

Kapoor is a senior vice president and the managing director of The Tolly Group, a strategic consulting and independent testing firm in Manasquan, N.J. Columnist Kevin Tolly will return in the May 3 issue. The Tolly Group can be reached at (732) 528-3300 or www.tolly.com.