Early this month the stars in Los Angeles weren’t walking the Red Carpet, nor Tweeting about #winning, nor trashing their dressing room. Instead they were on the blue carpet of the Los Angeles Convention Center at the OFC/NFOEC 2011 show. A few themes clearly stood out regarding the challenges faced by network operators trying to address the bandwidth growth driven by video and collaboration technologies:
- Investment Protection: The relentless need to optimize infrastructure investments
- MPLS-TP: Deployment of packet-based technologies for future transport networks
- Interoperability: Why scaling to 100 Gig in an interoperable manner will be critical
- Optical Component Innovation: How coherent optical technology, flexible spectrum and component modules will be leveraged in future optical networks
Investment Protection: As providers continue to expand their converged backbone transport networks, they are carefully scrutinizing expenses. Bandwidth growth is driving the expansion and various technology approaches are being discussed to tackle it: efficient wavelength optimization, optical switching, optical bypass, packet switching, packet bypass, label switching and others. Some implementations focus on creating new platforms for each technology function. An ideal approach conserves existing investments without compromising performance. For example, label switching is a function that is fundamental to the core and is an easy, incremental deployment within established platforms. Adding this capability to established platforms makes best use of existing infrastructure and avoids new qualification cycles.
MPLS-TP: Today MPLS is evolving the transport architecture with MPLS-TP and recently implemented in Cisco’s new Carrier Packet Transport (CPT) platform. The CPT attracted the interest of many customers, and we heard a number of positive comments at the event:
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Tags: 100GE, carrier packet transport, Cisco, CoreOptics, cpt, CRS-3, MPLS-TP, OFC/NFOEC, Optical, Service Provider
