Optical access platforms are designed to help new carriers leverage the current telecom market disruption for their own success. The market structure rewards products and solutions that have the inherent power to push optical networks beyond the domain of carrier backbones, providing fiber access for last-mile services—the crucial missing high-performance link in data networks.

This new era in managed optical access will be marked by carriers who gain the competitive advantage by providing high-speed architectures, which lift network performance above and beyond customers’ ever-increasing data traffic requirements.

These new optical access solutions are designed to allow service providers to address these opportunities effectively. New equipment can bridge the gap between voice- and data-oriented architectures with bandwidth- and protocol-independent platforms. New bandwidth-allocation features enable carriers to support different protocols and optimize them for a particular application. By separately transmitting individual protocols, each on its own wavelength, the need for tunneling or protocol conversion is minimized. With these new features, carriers can remotely provision and upgrade bandwidth via software, rather than physically restructuring equipment. They can even allow customers to control how much bandwidth they add or remove from their network capacity.