Fujitsu Upgrades Wavelength Access Platform

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. announced today a new release of its FLASHWAVE 7420 wavelength access platform targeting the metro access providers with a pay-as-you-grow architecture.

With the new 7420, carriers can start with low-cost, low-end applications and literally grow it, said Mike Sabelhaus, director of photonics planning for Fujitsu.

He explained the 7420 upgrade adds a number of capabilities that enable cost-effective and scalable deployments, straddling the access and core domains for IOCs and CLECs, or extending the FLASHWAVE 7500 core platform deployments of larger RBOCs. These additions include, among other capabilities, increased wavelength support, CWDM and ROADM functionality, available core and access transponders, RAMAN amplification and a new 1ru chassis.

We are trying to position the product as an access device that can migrate into core applications also, said Sabelhaus. For those customers that need core cards that need lots of performance monitoring, you have it. If you want to do lower cost applications, you can do that also.

The 7420, which is the result of an OEM relationship with ADVA Optical Networking Inc., takes its cues from popular features of lower-end products, such as ADVAs FSP 2000, which is targeted toward enterprises. For example, the 7420 allows carriers to install a CWDM system that supports up to eight waves and migrates to full DWDM system.

As mentioned, the 7420 also offers the choice of core or access transponders. While the core transponders offer greater performance monitoring and support for GFP, virtual concatenation and network-side framing, the access transponders offer lower cost and good (but not optimal) performance, said Sabelhaus.

We can offer a 30 to 40 percent differential in [price between] the core versus access cards, he said.

The 7420 allows operators to keep their options open in other ways. For instance, it is ROADM-ready.

We are offering capabilities that give you the option of doing a fixed network first and over time being able to add a ROADM function, said Sabelhouse. The 7420 will not ship with a ROADM, and upgrades initially will be two-degrees only.

While ROADMs are gaining traction in the core, they are not yet proved necessary in the metro access space, said Per Hansen, director of business development for ADVA.

A lot of carriers dont have a ROADM demand today, but they want to have the capability in the future, he said. The 7420s ROADM-readiness is an insurance policy enabling carriers to put off adding the functionality. The driver on day one is the low first cost of install from a static system but they havent said no to a ROADM, he said.

There are several other cost-saving features, such as the ability to transmit 80 protected wavelengths (up from 32 in prior releases) to allow up to 640 separate services to be transported over a single pair of fibers. It also supports transmission distances of up to 200km across a single span, and new Raman amplification modules support network distances beyond 1,000km without regeneration.

The 7420 also includes a 4 gigabit transponder muxponder that takes advantage of 2.5 gigabit dispersion compensation and distances techniques without the penalties of 10g dispersion and distance loads.

It really gives you the lowest gigE per cost in your system architecture, said Sabelhaus. Its pretty unique technology. We believe we are the first to have it out there.

Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. http://us.fujitsu.com/telecom
ADVA Optical Networks Inc. www.advaoptical.com