Fremont,
CA, March 21, 2003
- Optoplex Corporation today announced its new tunable
optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) with the critical
HITLESS feature that is highly desirable for optical communication
networks. The prototype will be demonstrated at the Optical
Fiber Communications (OFC) Exhibition to be held in Atlanta,
Georgia, March 25-27, 2003, at booth #3662.
Based on a single tunable
filter, a tunable OADM (TOADM)
can be utilized to add/drop a small number of channels
while allowing most of channels passing through and thus
providing a cost-effective and performance-enhanced solution
compared to the demux-switch-mux based reconfigurable
OADM. However, to date, all commercially available tunable-filter
based TOADMs have a “HIT” characteristic that
is undesirable by network operators. A HIT refers to a
temporary signal outage for certain optical channels while
the TOADM is tuned from one wavelength to the other. The
period of the signal outage depends on the tuning speed
of the device and causes network disruptions for revenue
generating services.
HITLESS, is correspondingly
defined as wavelength tuning from one particular channel
to another for adding/dropping operation without affecting
all other channels going through the TOADM. By the inherent
nature of all the available DWDM filter technologies,
tuning from one wavelength to another without affecting
wavelengths in between is extremely challenging. Therefore,
the HITLESS feature is marveled as the Holy Grail of TOADM
by the industry experts.
While network operators
seek for ways to take the existing huge bandwidth capacity
and turn it into revenue generating services, the need
to provide ways of peeling off streams of light signals
from bundles of wavelengths passing through a node will
continued to evolve and grow. Compared to the currently
adapted reconfigurable OADM based on switching or Broadcast-and-Select
architecture, tunable filter based TB-OADM offers huge
cost saving and better performance while providing the
flexibility required in meeting unpredictable and on-demand
bandwidth routing.
Optoplex plans to have
the TB-OADM/Sub-band demux subsystem fully pass the Telcordia
reliability requirement by the first quarter of 2003.
