SuperComm Preliminaries

Although opening day of SuperComm 2001 is still more than two weeks away, the onslaught of product announcements and strategic initiatives that will be demonstrated and highlighted in Atlanta beginning June 5 is already in full force.

To avoid getting lost among the high-tech scrum of product announcements at the show, innovative startups, such as Atoga Systems, Crescent Networks, LuxN, Movaz Networks, Pelago Networks and Teraburst Networks are taking the curtains off of their SuperComm surprises early.

The range of products announced this week, which include next-generation optical switching and transport gear, high-speed edge switches and packet-based voice technology, provide a snapshot of the variety of telecommunications gear likely to be showcased in Atlanta.

Atoga's product announcement actually spans three product categories, as the company is designing equipment that unites a Sonet add/drop module, an IP router and DWDM gear in the same system. The Optical Application Router 30 is a larger version of Atoga's flagship product line. It is designed to provide carriers with the agility to match application requirements with available optical bandwidth.

Atoga has expanded the reach of its hardware by adding in-line optical amplifiers to the system, making it easier for carriers to provision high-speed optical transport systems.

"Our goal is to make DWDM plug and play," says Cüneyt Özveren, chief executive officer at Atoga.

With essentially the same objective in mind, LuxN this week will take the wraps off its Optical Service Level Management System. The metro-oriented DWDM startup is unveiling the new management system in conjunction with a partnership with Ethernet-based service provider Yipes.

The new management system, which works at the optical layer, enables Yipes to support non-Ethernet protocols, such as those associated with storage services, without installing Sonet equipment, which is often required to monitor the quality of public-network connections.

"Normally we wouldn't be able to provide ESCON support," says Ron Young, co-founder of Yipes. "But now, on the same fiber, we are running [Gigabit Ethernet] traffic we can also aggregate lambdas carrying that storage traffic."

Crescent Networks is among legions of edge-router makers focusing on providing carriers with the tools to offer value-added services on top of their IP networks. Crescent is pushing a virtual-router strategy with its VRX-1000 Service Edge Router, which essentially gives service providers the ability to offer customers what amounts to a private pipeline to the public network.

Movaz Networks this week is also giving followers the first glimpse of its wavelength-management system for the metropolitan portion of the network. Movaz announced the successful alpha testing of it's integrated optical switching and transport system. By integrating wavelength management and transport, Movaz helps to provide carriers with an intelligent device capable of establishing optical routes across their networks without manual intervention.

Movaz's vice president of network architecture is Daniel Awduche, one of the visionaries behind UUNet's use of MPLS as a mechanism for engineering bandwidth on a major scale. Awduche is also the co-author of the framework for multiprotocol Lambda switching, which essentially extends MPLS to include optical circuits as a path for carrying IP traffic between routers.

Not surprisingly, much of Movaz's technology relies on using a form of MPLS as a single control plane to unite the data and optical portions of the network.

Newcomer Pelago Networks is also looking to make a splash in the voice space by concentrating on integration. Pelago, depending on your viewpoint, represents either the next phase of the softswitch revolution or the repudiation of it.

Instead of breaking down voice transmission systems into separate hardware and software entities, which is at the heart of the softswitch movement's attempt to offer a more flexible alternative to circuit switches, Pelago fuses them back together. Pelago chief executive Jean Dubois says that, while the distribution of circuit switches into multiple components was appropriate for the center of the network, it is not a manageable approach for offering services to customers at the edge. The problem, he says, is that the complexity of delivering Class 5 features is actually compounded by multi-component systems.

"By the time you try to address some basic voice requirements, you end up with nine or so products talking across green protocols," says Dubois.

Dubois is referring to the emerging protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol, that equipment makers are using to interconnect systems. While acknowledging that these protocols are important for establishing interoperability across manufacturers, Dubois says they do not in themselves lead to an open system, which is what carriers crave.

Pelago's approach is to introduce a Java-based service-creation environment and to open up the programming interfaces of its hardware system. The combination, says Dubois, will provide incumbent carriers and CLECs with the ability to offer differentiated services.

Although Pelago's Odysea Programmable Service Switch would appear to be a return to the monolithic model embraced by Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies, Dubois says that it is possible to have an integrated system and open programmability at the same time. In fact, he says such a combination is the only way carriers will be able to migrate traditional voice services to a packet-based environment.

"If you want to do real service creation," he says, "you have to open up the APIs."

TeraBurst Networks is trying to make a hop, skip and jump to the next level of evolution in the optical-switching market. The company is introducing an optical-switching system that integrates both electronic and pure photonic technologies. The idea is to create a system that offers the benefits of both forms of technology and the weakness of neither.

The TeraBurst system uses a "transparent" electronic system, say officials. This enables the hardware to switch wavelengths of traffic independent of protocols or bit rates. However, keeping the transmission in the electrical domain enables the switch to perform wavelength conversion and regeneration of the signal if necessary.

TeraBurst is hoping to beat the rest of the field to a hybrid switching system. Makers of electronic-oriented gear, such as Ciena, Sycamore and Tellium, have announced plans to integrate photonic switch fabrics, and makers of photonic gear, such as Corvis, are working toward adding the ability to break wavelengths into smaller increments of capacity through electronic technology.

Finally, WaveSmith is following up on its technology launch of a few weeks ago with the introduction of the Distributed Node multiservice switch. The DN is essentially a high-speed successor to legacy ATM products from vendors like Lucent and Newbridge Networks that have not been upgraded in close to a decade. The major improvement brought by the WaveSmith family, says Chad Dunn of WaveSmith, is the ability to provide carriers with a migratory route to an IP backbone for their legacy traffic.

Like dozens of edge players in the space, WaveSmith officials say that a convergence on an IP backbone is inevitable. Unlike those making IP-centric devices, which call on MPLS as the mechanism of migration, WaveSmith believes that the transition will not happen overnight.

"There's not going to be a wholesale upgrade to IP," says Dunn. "Service providers need something that migrates these services over time and in a gradual way."

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