Transparent Wavelength Services

Today, wavelength services are an important and growing source of revenue among service providers. Yet, the real opportunity for wavelength services is only now unfolding.

The demand for wavelength services has been perceived as low because of the disincentives associated with long contracts, high prices and tough restrictions that come with dedicated builds of first-generation WDM equipment. The catch-22 is that carriers have been unable to eliminate these disincentives because they lacked a flexible, cost-effective platform for delivering services. As a result, carriers have been forced to improvise a costly and complex service delivery platform using first-generation WDM transport equipment. Consequently, the carriers have not seen huge demand for wavelengths.

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Xtera's Agile Optical Networking portfolio comprises the 3300 OSM at the access layer, 7200 OSP for multi-degree switching in the metro core and the 6400 OTP for flexible transport in metro core-regional networks, all supported by unified network planning and management systems.

Here is the key: the carrier who breaks from the status quo and deploys a converged, flexible service delivery platform that can meet the cost points will be rewarded handsomely. With the Xtera Agile Optical Networking infrastructure, carriers benefit from a more agile, cost-effective transport solution that enables them to capture a significant revenue and market share opportunity. The addressable market for Agile Optical Networking services expands from the Fortune 50 to the Fortune 5000.

The Xtera Agile Optical Networking architecture enables carriers to deliver all high-speed regional-metro services (Optical Ethernet, SONET/SDH, wavelengths, SANs, and more) in a way that is far more cost-effective than first-generation WDM equipment. Through extensive joint customer-vendor research activity, Xtera Communications has proven that typical network costs can be reduced by 70% by using an agile wavelength networking infrastructure. The window of opportunity to capture high-end enterprise customers is now!

Cost Savings Through Shared Deployments

Until now, service providers tended to roll out dedicated structures for wavelength services. Each deployment was a special build, requiring dedicated equipment including fiber. As a result, service providers were not able to leverage any economies of scale from these builds. Furthermore, these dedicated builds were time-consuming to deploy (slowing the time to revenue), and added unnecessarily to the issue of fiber exhaust.

By contrast, the Xtera solution can be deployed on a shared infrastructure in a virtual private fashion, offering numerous benefits. The Xtera solution costs 70% less than dedicated builds. Also, the Xtera solution makes it possible to add a service onto an existing infrastructure, which means that the service can be turned up more quickly, accelerating the time to revenue. With the Xtera Agile Optical Networking solution, the bottom line is that services can be brought to market with healthy margins, and can be scaled to meet increasing customer demand.

Simplified Engineering

One of the major issues with deploying a wavelength infrastructure has been the difficulty of engineering. With ring-centric optical add/drop multiplexers (OADMs), making adds, moves and changes has been extremely challenging, hence the need for dedicated builds. Even a simple task like adding a wavelength to the network can mean customer outages and expensive labor costs. Adding a wavelength can cost tens of thousands of dollars in labor alone, as trucks and technicians are dispatched to every central office for installation and power re-balancing of the entire network.

The award-winning Xtera 7200 OSP (Optical Switching Platform) and 6400 Optical Transport Platform (OTP) make it simple to engineer wavelength networks. Simplification is achieved through a combination of features such as wavelength translation and 3R signal improvement. Wavelength translation enables end-to-end provisioning of lightpaths. Wavelength translation also allows a mix-and-match of CWDM and DWDM on the same system delivering greater flexibility and eliminating stranded resources. Furthermore, service providers can add wavelengths to just those spans requiring more capacity-not the entire network. The Xtera solution supports ring, mesh, point-to-point topologies, or any combination, and the seamless migration from one topology to another. With its out-of-the-box WDMTM offering, the Xtera solution engineers optically "like a SONET network."

Advanced Performance Monitoring

Another criticism of wavelength networks has been the lack of visibility offered. Service providers are accustomed to having Layer 1 statistics to ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are being met. More and more, end customers are demanding increased visibility into the performance of their network. Traditionally, wavelengths have provided little in the way of monitoring statistics, making it impossible to offer SLAs for wavelengths.

With the Xtera wavelength networking solution, performance monitoring statistics such as bit error rates and severely errored seconds, are reported at regular intervals. With these advances in network management, service providers can transform their transport-centric infrastructure into a service-centric offering.

Superior Planning Capabilities

The Xtera 9500 NPT (Network Planning Tool) is a network planning/design tool package for the entire Xtera Agile Optical Networking solution. The 9500 NPT makes it possible to quickly design the most efficient networks based on network demand and span information. With an end-to-end automated network planning tool, service providers save tremendous amounts of time and money, and can ensure the final network design is optimized for their unique requirements.

Wavelength Networking Means Improved Margins for all Regional-Metro Services

Now that a wavelength infrastructure can be deployed as a flexible resource that is easy to engineer and easy to monitor, this opens up many new opportunities for service providers. Given that wavelengths are less expensive to deploy, it makes sense to use a wavelength infrastructure to deploy high-speed regional-metro services such as SONET/SDH services, Optical Ethernet and SAN services. With lower costs and ongoing OPEX savings, service providers can meet the cost points that enterprises are looking for, and dramatically increase revenues and market share.