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.

For more information, please write to info@optoplex.com or call (510) 490-9930.

Optoplex Offers Hitless TOADM, 3/21/2006 in Light Reading NEWS WIRE FEED