After several years of baking in the telecom industry's development ovens, reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing, or ROADM, technology finally appeared to break through within the last year or so. A handful of ROADM solutions were announced at Supercomm 2004, with many more following through early this year.

The segment, once limited by the high cost of tuneable lasers, proved so popular within the last year that the ROADM market is suddenly — after many years — tightly competitive. Though many of the early ROADM products used a demux/switch/mux core design, vendors have begun to innovate with other types of ROADMs, including broadcast and select, and wavelength selective switch (WSS)-based fabrics.

At Supercomm 2005, ROADM vendors tried to separate themselves from the pack by offering variations on these fabric approaches, as well as architectural upgrades and new features. Fujitsu, which just a few months ago was identified by RHK as the ROADM market share leader with 75% of the worldwide market, highlighted its recent Release 4.1 upgrade to its Flashwave 7500 system, which uses a WSS fabric.

The new release allows for remote automated add/drop functionality and self-tuning amplifiers, reducing power and fiber requirements, along with the need for manual configuration. “This sets you up to support grooming of traffic in optical hubbing configurations, so you don't need as many transponders,” said Randy Eisenach, senior marketing manager for Fujitsu Network Communications.

Release 4.1 of the Flashwave 7500 system is available in a core-sized configuration of up to 40 channels but also in a small system that supports up to 16 or 32 channels, as well as a point-to-point system.

WSS is a relatively new approach to ROADMs and is not yet supported by a standard, but Eisenach said it is more efficient than other ROADM switch fabrics. WSS lets the ADM system pass or divert wavelengths on a dynamic basis.

While Fujitsu favors the WSS fabric for ROADM architectures, not all vendors are on the same page. OpVista, for example, supports a broadcast and select ROADM fabric. “There are some arguments out there suggesting that it's inefficient to use a broadcast architecture, but we counter with the transmission of high-density wavelengths using ultra-DWDM technology,” said Brian Drachman director of product marketing for OpVista.

The company announced its new Switched Ring Architecture, which adds the feature of full-protection switching to its MetroVista ROADM-based DWDM system.

“We've added to the scalability and reliability of the system by creating underlying switched-ring protection for it,” Drachman said.

For many vendors, the excitement of ROADM technology is being stoked by several carrier optical deployment requests for proposals on the table in which ROADMs reportedly figure prominently.

While Fujitsu's market leadership appears to give it an edge in deals that come up for bid, one way OpVista has sought to avoid the vendor bottleneck in the ROADM market is by focusing heavily on cable TV companies. The week after Supercomm, the company took its Switched Ring Architecture to the Cable Tec Expo.

Furthering the potential for a competitive shakeout, some of the early vendor entrants in the ROADM market, such as Movaz Networks, Meriton Networks and Mahi Networks, also took Supercomm 2005 as an opportunity to expand product portfolios that had been well-received at Supercomm 2004.

Meriton announced a new platform integrating ROADM and optical cross-connect functions.

For stalwart vendor Mahi Networks, ROADM technology has been central to the company's strategic migration away from the market of Layer 2 Sonet aggregation devices, said Alan DiCicco, senior manager of product marketing for Mahi Networks.

“It's a migration from services over Sonet to services over WDM,” he said. “We want to do Gigabit Ethernet services over WDM through Sonet. Basically, everything's got a Gig E feed now.”

The company's V×7 Multiservice ROADM system is a WSS-based system that uses Mahi's VersiColor technology. “[The V×7] encompasses everything the earliest WDM systems lacked,” DiCicco said. “There is so much less engineering needed now that the wavelength can be handled unencumbered. It makes it as easy to deploy and manage WDM technology as Sonet ever was.”

Meanwhile, Movaz is looking to cover all potential ROADM adoption models by taking its Ray-ROADM platform in two different directions. One element of its two-pronged strategy is a universal Ray-uROADM system designed for incrementally focused growth and reconfiguration of up to several hundred wavelengths. The other is the Ray-eROADM platform module that can be added to any node in an optical ADM configuration where a carrier wants reconfiguration capability.

The second product addresses the likelihood that ROADM won't be coming to carrier networks in massive networkwide upgrades. Adva Optical, another established player in the market, feels the same way, according to Brian McCann, chief marketing and strategy officer for Adva Optical.

“We believe in an optical layer with more of a hybrid ROADM functionality,” McCann said. “We believe that ROADM has a place and a time, but it's really not needed right now for all ADMs.”

For Adva, ROADM is instead just another part of the company's overall strategy for DWDM and coarse WDM (CWDM). The vendor announced at Supercomm 2005 that Belgian network operator Belgacom is deploying Adva's FSP 2000 CWDM systems and renewing an existing contract for DWDM systems. The systems are supporting enterprise applications such as interconnections between storage area networks, McCann said.

Adva, which uses the mantra “optical plus Ethernet” to describe its strategic balance, also used Supercomm 2005 to announce Release 2.0 of its FSP 150 product family, including new Gigabit Ethernet aggregation, Ethernet demarcation and tandem node protection. The platform is based on the 802.3ah Ethernet in the first-mile (EFM) standard.

That standard, finalized last summer during the same week that Supercomm 2004 was held and approved by the IEEE earlier this year, has helped pave the way for an increasing amount of Ethernet deployment and usage in carrier networks. One of the highlights of this year's Supercomm, in fact, was the Metro Ethernet Forum's carrier Ethernet interoperability demonstration.

Twenty-nine vendors and carriers participated in the interoperability demonstration, which the MEF was using to tout its carrier Ethernet certification program. That program will govern testing for conformance to the EFM standard, as well as interoperability between equipment from different vendors. Certification testing was scheduled to begin earlier this month, with certified product expected to be available by the time the first Carrier Ethernet World Conference opens in Berlin on Sept. 12, according to Colin Evans, vice president, director and co-chair of marketing for the MEF.

“If we were creating this forum today, we probably wouldn't call it the Metro Ethernet Forum,” Evans said. “Ethernet is moving out of the enterprise to become the de facto connectivity model. It's now becoming the preferred physical uplink for broadband wireless and for homes.”

While product certification and interoperability programs addressing other industry segments, such as WiMAX, have taken months or years to come together, Evans said the MEF was able to move rapidly from standard to certification because “Ethernet is a much more mature technology. All of the equipment is in place. We envision eventually having a certification lab on every continent.”

Mark Fishburn, chairman of the MEF, said the Supercomm demonstration and the large number of vendors showcasing Ethernet technology at the event was evidence of how far the technology has come.

“Ethernet really started as a business networking technology, but the increased bandwidth and flexibility it provided at lower cost helped it evolve into a metro technology,” Fishburn said. “For those same reasons, it has evolved to support triple-play services. Carriers at one point weren't quite comfortable with it, but the attraction of the business enterprise market, where Ethernet was dominant, was too strong for them.”

Yet, at the same time, Fishburn, who is also vice president of technical strategy for Spirent Communications, said “carrier-class Ethernet” is characterized by many more management and quality of service capabilities than the version of the technology that has become so popular in the enterprise market.

“The ITU is doing a lot to create definitions for the scalability, protection, service management and hard quality of service policies that need to be supported in a carrier-class version of Ethernet,” he said. “That also includes support for legacy TDM networks.”

Another MEF event at Supercomm provided even more evidence that Ethernet is evolving into a popular carrier medium. The MEF announced the winners of its first “U.S. Carrier Ethernet Service Provider of the Year” awards, with AT&T winning “Service Provider of the Year: Best in Business,” and Yipes Enterprise Services earning “Service Provider of the Year: Outstanding Innovation.”

In addition to Adva's Ethernet-related product launch, companies such as MRV Communications, Covaro Networks and Metrobility Optical Solutions each announced new Ethernet advancements at Supercomm.

MRV launched a new metro Ethernet router, the OptiSwitch 9000, a carrier-class provisioner of Ethernet/IP/MPLS services and MEF-specified E-Line and E-LAN virtual circuits. It also aggregates Gigabit Ethernet links and provides WDM transport.

Covaro's Supercomm news went in a different, unwired direction. The company announced a partnership with DragonWave, a vendor of broadband wireless access solutions, under which Covaro will extend the range of its Etherjack platform by combining it with DragonWave's AirPair product to remotely enable native Ethernet services at up to 200 Mb/s.

Meanwhile, Metrobility announced at the show that the Raleigh, N.C., division of Time Warner Cable is deploying the company's Radiance E-Services suite, which will allow the cable TV company to roll out multiprotocol optical Ethernet services to large and small business customers.

ROADMs and carrier Ethernet are two innovations in the optical arena that are giving the telecom industry reason to have some optimism about this once-struggling segment. They may not be arriving with enough hype to restore the industry's bubble-era confidence, but really, who wants that?

North American Ethernet service market 2004

Category	Metro E-Line	Intercity E-Line	Metro E-LAN	Intercity E-LAN	Totals
PORTS IN-SERVICE
Canada	20,170	3794	12,756	2388	39,109
U.S.	16,373	2121	9183	636	28,313
Total	36,543	5915	21,939	3024	67,422
REVENUES (MILLIONS OF U.S. DOLLARS)
Canada	135.7	55.6	155.8	39.0	386.1
U.S.	257.5	36.4	145.1	14.5	453.6
Total	393.2	91.9	301.0	53.5	839.6
Source: RHK Inc.

North American service provider share rankings 2004

CANADIAN SERVICE PROVIDER	PORTS	REVENUES
360networks / Group Telecom	4	4
Allstream	3	3
Bell Canada	1	1
Telecom Ottawa	5	5
Telus	2	2
U.S. SERVICE PROVIDER	PORTS	REVENUES
AT&T	10	1
BellSouth	4	6
Cogent Communications	1	3
Comcast Commercial Services	9	8
MCI	8	10
SBC	5	2
Time Warner Telecom	3	5
Verizon	2	4
XO Communications	7	7
Yipes Enterprise Services	6	9
Source: RHK Inc.