Ciena Scores First Customer for New Cross-Connect

As part of a three-year agreement, Williams Communications will become the first customer to deploy N/A's MultiWave CoreDirector. Pending successful completion of product trial and certification, which is expected in early calendar 2000, Ciena anticipates that Williams will deploy at least $40 million worth of CoreDirector equipment over the term of the contract.

"Ciena's CoreDirector is central to Williams' optical network," said Greg Floerke, vice president of engineering and construction for the Williams network. "CoreDirector will provide the high-bandwidth switching, protection, and provisioning capabilities for our next generation optical network, making it possible for us to offer our carrier customers switched optical services ranging from wavelengths to protected private line services."

The CoreDirector features a software-driven "Optical Signaling and Routing Protocol" (OSRP), which enables distributed, dynamic information exchange between networked CoreDirectors. OSRP enables each CoreDirector to "see" the status of other CoreDirectors, evaluate the state of the network, and select the best path for traffic to travel across the network to its destination.

This intelligence delivers rapid service delivery through real-time service provisioning to Williams' network, which shortens the carriers' time to revenue on service delivery. The networking intelligence also enables Williams to grow and manage its network with fewer operations staff.

Williams' network architecture couples ATM core switching with optical networking technologies to provide carriers with data, voice, video, and Internet services over the platform they choose.

"CoreDirector's unique ability to deliver rapid restoral (sic) through a mesh-based protection scheme supports our strategy of offering integrated voice and data services to our targeted carrier market," Floerke says. CoreDirector supports simultaneous ring, linear line, and path-level mesh protection, allowing multiple concurrent protection mechanisms, including software-defined rings, standards-compliant linear APS protection, and path-level restoration.

The density, scalability, range of optical interfaces, and software-definable switching granularity of CoreDirector eliminate the need for additional SONET/SDH add/drop multiplexers, digital cross-connects, and optical cross-connects in next-generation network architectures, Ciena proclaims. Eliminating the need for SONET ADMs lowers network equipment and operations costs.

CoreDirector provides up to 640 Gb/s of full duplex switching in a single 7-foot telco rack. The initial release of the product supports 256 OC-48/STM-16 or 64 OC-192/STM-64 interfaces in a single bay, with the ability to scale to multi-bay configurations supporting multi-terabit capacity, including OC-768/STM-256 transmission in the future. CoreDirector supports OC-3/STM-1, OC-12/STM-4, OC-48/STM-16, and OC-192/STM-64 optical interfaces to accommodate legacy switches and routers without requiring standalone SONET/SDH multiplexers. Any CoreDirector optical interface may be software-configured for full wavelength switching or channelized STS-N granularity, down to STS-1.