Fujitsu recently participated in a ROADM trial with AT&T and Ciena in the Dallas area, which highlighted potential benefits from the open platform.
On this week’s “NFV/SDN Reality Check,” we speak with Blake Hlavaty, software solutions architect at Fujitsu, to discuss the company’s recent trial work with AT&T on the open reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer-compliant technology and get his views on the importance of ongoing support for multivendor platforms.
The trial, which was recently conducted in the Dallas area, involved AT&T implementing a 100-gigabit per second optical wavelength on a production network using open ROADM technology. The move included the connection of two IP multiprotocol label switching routers with transponders and ROADMs from Ciena and Fujitsu.
Andre Fuetsch, CTO at AT&T Labs, claimed the implementation was the industry’s first multivendor interoperability for optical transport equipment carrying live customer traffic, with the ROADMs supporting “full software control according to the published open ROADM specification.” Ciena and Fujitsu are both part of AT&T’s Domain 2.0 program.
In describing the initial ROADM plans earlier this year, Fuetsch noted “In most ROADMs today, there are particular ‘lanes’ dedicated to each wavelength of laser light that comes into the switch. You can’t easily move signals to less congested lanes if traffic gets heavy on the original path. That’s where software control comes in. Software-controlled ROADMs can automatically detect and adjust bandwidth. They can move traffic to different lanes as needed. These software-controlled ROADMs can turn capacity up or down, route around trouble and come back online quickly when there’s a failure.”
The platform is being used to help the carrier deal with growing data traffic demand on its wireless network, which Fuetsch said grew 150,000% between 2007 – just prior to the launch of Apple’s iPhone device – and 2015.
Hlavaty touched on how Fujitsu became involved in the ROADM trial, details on the actual trial and what the results mean for the telecommunications industry. He also discussed the importance of open platforms and support for interoperability when it comes to designing hardware and software platforms for software-defined optical networks.
Thanks for watching this week’s show, and make sure to check out our next “NFV/SDN Reality Check” when we are scheduled to speak with Canonical on its view of OpenStack development and deployment by telecom operators.
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