The unrelenting growth of bandwidth demand is causing a number of dilemmas for network operators including how best to accommodate the need to provision higher-rate circuits, both for enterprise private-line customers and for operators’ own infrastructure for higher-layer services. Until a few years ago, T1/E1, T3/E3, and the occasional OC-3/STM-1 satisfied almost all private line and infrastructure needs, and SONET/SDH networks provided an efficient and ubiquitous means to provision these circuits. While these methods will not disappear overnight, demand for low-speed PDH circuits (except for wireless backhaul) is starting to decline, while the market for high-speed circuits is growing.

End-to-end OTN service switching is the most economical way to compete for and accommodate the growth in highbandwidth optical services.

The advantages of end-to-end OTN service switching have become substantial even while 10G wavelengths predominate, but will be absolutely critical as wavelengths migrate to 40G and 100G in the future. As long as a majority of customer services remain under 10 Gb/s, the need to aggregate many such services across multiple modules onto a 40/100G wavelength or to switch these services between such wavelengths among several degrees will become even more severe.

Therefore, end-to-end OTN service switching is becoming an architectural imperative. No other solution allows operators to turn up new services faster and more efficiently while removing the cost of uncertainty in future traffic mix. These same OTN benefits apply to the optical layer for packet services, resulting in a more nimble and cost-effective converged infrastructure for all traffic types.