MCI WorldCom, Hitachi Advance Optical Cross-Connect Trial

Claiming the first 100% optically transparent platform with ring or mesh protection, Hitachi Telecom (USA) Inc. (Norcross, GA) reports that MCI WorldCom (Jackson, MS) has successfully trialed its optical cross-connect (OXC) systems.

In the trial, optical rings transported various types of traffic from different types of equipment manufactured by multiple vendors. The switch architecture and algorithm within the optical cross connects allowed optical restoration times less than the benchmark 50-millisecond synchronous optical network (SONET) standard.

MCI WorldCom used six separate OXC nodes configured as dual rings. The OXCs provided the optical switching and restoration mechanism, and two of the nodes served as ring interconnection points. Each OXC node served as a gateway for traffic entering the ring at various rates from gigabit Ethernet up to 40 Gb/s, including OC-48 (2.5 Gb/s) router traffic and OC-192 (10 Gb/s) SONET traffic.