OIF to Try on Its UNI at Supercomm

An interoperability demonstration between IP and optical gear at next week's Supercomm is being lauded as a crucial first step toward on-the-fly provisioning of high-capacity circuits, but officials involved in the test acknowledge that significant work still lies ahead.

The demo, which is expected to include 25 makers of network equipment, is centered on the user network interface (UNI) protocol developed by the Optical Internetworking Forum. OIF president Adam Dunstan, who is also VP of technology at router maker Avici Systems, says he's pleased with the better-than-expected participation but doesn't expect the specification to be completed until later this year.

"We're not quite there yet," Dunstan says. "There's still a little bit of work to get through on this one."

Representatives from one company that will not participate in the demo and who asked not to be identified said that the UNI spec is not far enough along to justify the expense of assigning engineers to the interoperability demonstration.

"For us it was a timing thing," said one official. "It just didn't make sense for us to put bodies on something that wasn't going anywhere."

While Dunstan acknowledges that the spec could still change before it is completed, he adds that UNI's foundation is solid and that any work invested at this point would not be wasted.

Dunstan points to the number of companies participating in the demo as validation of interest in a standard mechanism that will enable routers and switches to make requests for bandwidth from the optical layer of the network. Scheduled participants include Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and a host of startups.

Rival router maker Juniper Networks is not participating in the demo.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in The Net Economy.