Table of Contents:

Definition and Overview

1. Market Background

2. Service Provider Trends and Issues

3. Evolution of Optical Metro Access Technologies

4. Next-Generation Optical Access and Transport Solutions

5. Conclusion

Self-Test

Glossary

PDF of this tutorial

Definition
In a world of ever-increasing bandwidth capacity at the core and higher-bandwidth applications originating from the user, an incredible amount of pressure has been placed on metropolitan edge networks. A new generation of metro on-ramps promises to relieve this pressure and to offer carriers ways to create competitive advantage in the complex, high-stakes game of providing converged voice and data services.

Overview
Customer demand for broadband voice and data services has exploded. A new world of bandwidth-hungry, multiprotocol services is providing a tremendous opportunity for incumbent and emerging carriers alike. Services such as videoconferencing, storage-area networking, Internet audio, and telecommuting are likely to replace standard voice and 56–kbps data as the dominant profit centers in the next few years.

While local services are consuming ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, metro and long-haul core networks are experiencing dramatic improvements in bandwidth efficiency. With the advent of technologies such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), today’s fiber technology can deliver in excess of 1 Petabit per second over a single optical cable.

This convergence of high-bandwidth applications originating from the user and high-bandwidth capacity at the core is placing a tremendous amount of pressure on the edge of metropolitan networks. A new breed of optical metro access and transport devices promises to break this bottleneck between the user and the core, bringing core bandwidth and switching intelligence right to the network edge.

This tutorial discusses the drivers that are causing pressure on today’s metro edge, as well as the challenges facing service providers who wish to offer converged voice and data services. Several solutions that are available on the market today are then examined. Finally, the tutorial discusses a new class of metro access and transport platform that is built to solve modern metro networking problems.