September 2008 Archives

Friday 26 September 2008, Day Four, Carrier Ethernet World Congress, Berlin

TRAFFIC CONTROL PROBLEM CAUSES NON-DETERMINISTIC PLANE MANAGEMENT
By Mark Lum

It's the fourth and final day of CEWC, somewhat diminished in quantity of delegates, if not in quality, and your diarist arrives to find himself — and more importantly, Verizon Business — in hot water for yesterday's apparently contentious diary.

In case any readers missed seeing that, and in order to cool the water, I will more clearly re-state Verizon's bold comment as "There is no Carrier Ethernet access service standardisation". A rather evident situation, it seems to me! And one that is being addressed by important developments such as the MEF's E-NNI and wholesale access interconnect, Ofcom's Ethernet ALA requirements, and numerous other related standards and carrier activities that delegates have heard about during the week. The big question: how much will carriers want to align the very services that they compete on? A difficult area, certainly, but the industry's prognosis is positive and further progress should be made over the coming year.

Today's focus is "Future Ethernet" and whilst the headline "MPLS versus PBT" technology war has subsided, there is plenty to keep the remaining delegates interested, including presentations from: Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper, Nortel and closing with a panel debate on options for Ethernet control and management and a synchronisation masterclass from Semtech.

Alert delegates will have heard several speakers mention SyncE — Synchronous Ethernet — during the week and be aware that synchronisation is a key requirement for mobile, and other, applications. As technical editor for several timing/sync ETSI and ITU standards during the 1990's, I can tell you this is rather an arcane subject, but one of critical importance for Carrier Ethernet and packet transport evolution. For experts only, perhaps?

Away from the bright spotlight of the opening days, we hear considered presentations helping to put the various Carrier Ethernet technologies into some perspective. Including a full acronymic spectrum encompassing GELS, T-MPLS, PBB-TE, BGP, MPLS-TE, IGP, CL-PS, VPWS, LDP, MPLS-TP, PLSB, CO-PS, PBB/MPLS, VPLS, and too many more to list.

MPLS-TP has received vocal support during CEWC as the way to simplify packet transport, and delegates learn now that 18 technical drafts have been identified to date, requiring development and agreement. Proponents tell us that they foresee a dynamic control plane, and also that carriers' existing TDM-oriented management systems will not, in fact, be suitable. On the face of it, it seems that complexity is needed to deliver simplicity! Your diarist has been variously informed that MPLS-TP standardisation may take 9, 12, 18 months or even 2 years. Let's see how the progress goes.

Well, that's it for another year: there is more at CEWC than can possibly be written about in a few diary pages, but I hope you've enjoyed a few glimpses here. Thanks for reading! Meanwhile, I and other UK residents are hoping that the Heathrow air traffic control problems of yesterday have been resolved, and we will find our way home in a deterministic fashion. I'm sure there is some telecom analogy to be drawn, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Carrier Ethernet World — complete with MEF technical briefings and EANTC equipment interop showcase — travels to Singapore this November for its Asia-Pacific debut edition. In conclusion from the MEF's official congress, notable progress has been made in scaling Carrier Ethernet and the market looks set to continue its strong growth in the coming year. See you in Berlin again for Carrier Ethernet World Congress 2009.

Read more of the CEWC Daily Digest, Day Four >

Thursday 25 September 2008, Carrier Ethernet World Congress, Berlin

HEGEL'S DIALECTICS GIVE WAY IN THE SHADOW OF BRANDENBURG'S GATE
By Mark Lum

Brandenburg Gate

Berlin's iconic Brandenburger Tor and Reichstag are literally just around the corner from the Maritim hotel and it's a cool and sunny walk out to a breakfast cafe before today's conference, to consider the depth of history present in this magnificent city.

A far cry indeed from the technical and business discussions of this week. Carriers tell me they are heartily glad that the heat of the recent technology wars is now dissipating: perhaps "storm in a teacup" would be the most polite verdict! Operators have bigger fish to fry, and are happy to still have a choice of Ethernet and MPLS technologies and vendors to support applications such as IPTV and access — today's principal topics. I learn that residents in Slovenia are offered by T-2: a 14 Euro/month 10M/10M broadband service plus 140 channels of IPTV at 12 Euro/month using Carrier Ethernet. Perhaps one day, we may all be so fortunate!

At the main event, it's something of a slow start, as many delegates are perhaps in a leisurely mood after being treated to vendor hospitality alongside a large display of vintage cars. I can only say that latecomers missed a fascinating exposition from MTN Nigeria, the first of today's service provider speakers including Belgacom ICS, BT Openreach, Deutsche Telekom, Magyar Telekom, NoaNet, Verizon Business and Virgin Media.

A case study in modern mobile network growth, MTN has grown to support 19 million subscribers in just 7 years, including a substantial proportion of 3G. Building entirely on PDH microwave access/backhaul with an SDH optical and microwave backbone, MTN continues to build about 180 new sites per month. In MTN's view evolution to Ethernet is certain, but it must be a gradual implementation whose starting time is still yet to be decided (perhaps somewhat disheartening to hear for the cheerleaders of Ethernet backhaul).

Over in Ofcom's parallel seminar on Ethernet Active Line Access, I find a sizeable number of delegates deliberating a fundamental question: how best to ensure competitive NGA (next generation access) using Ethernet? High-level speakers from the European Commission, HanseNet, IFNL, KPN plus industry bodies Broadband Forum, ITU and MEF are presenting their insights and thoughts. Ofcom is seeking to catalyse standardisation of Ethernet Access in the UK, perhaps beyond, and has published a new regulatory consultation on technical requirements.

I was relieved to hear one speaker — thank you, BT Openreach — to at least mention Green Telecoms, and the need to reduce power consumption. Any delegate who received a free sauna from the 16-rack CEWC interop showcase can relate to that. Trend-setting carriers such as BT and Verizon, are leading the way in this area, and I trust that others will follow in the next year.

Verizon Business gain today's "open and honest" award. Perhaps emboldened by its award as MEF European service provider of the year for business innovation, they stated "there is no such thing as Carrier Ethernet: there is no standardisation". I think they have a point! In the good old days, you knew exactly what an E1 or STM-1 circuit was: the specs were laid out, with no deviation. These days, an "Ethernet access service" can mean almost anything. Flexibility is surely a good thing, but perhaps not if you're a competitive carrier trying to offer consistent services around the world.

Looking back on today, it feels that the conference has moved a long way from the Kompella's "Purple Line" and Hegelian Dialectics of Day 1. In the carriers' world, the principal challenge is growing fancy new applications using cranky old access networks. It was always thus! But from Berlin, Carrier Ethernet is rising to the challenge as it continues to scale in momentum.

As the exhibition packs up around me, join me at the last day of Carrier Ethernet World Congress 2008, tomorrow.

Read more of the CEWC Daily Digest, Day Three >

Wednesday 24 September 2008, Carrier Ethernet World Congress, Berlin

AN INCONVENIENT TECHNOLOGY AND CARRIER ETHERNET MATURITY
By Mark Lum

Day 2 at CEWC, and with a full exhibition area and a streamed conference agenda concurrently covering mobile applications and business services, delegates have more than enough to keep themselves busy. There's a notable buzz and much enthusiasm. New media is much in evidence and several speakers — your diarist included — have been captured on vox-pops by a roving camera.

Yesterday's closing panel session of 8 leading vendors — plus 1 vacant chair! — presented a surprisingly united front that MPLS is the chosen route to support Carrier Ethernet services and applications. Despite the singular support of Extreme Networks for an Ethernet/PBB/PBT/PBB-TE approach, all other vendors were determined that MPLS is the only true way forward for Carrier Ethernet services.

A conclusion reinforced by BT which presented an update on its 21CN program without mentioning PBT, a key feature of recent years. 21CN has been "slightly re-focused" to support new services based on customer requirements, rather than PSTN replacement. BT now has an ambitious program to expand its Ethernet services coverage from 106 UK POPs to 600 by May 2009.

And yet, in a timely newswire yesterday, we see an announcement from the US that Sprint has selected Ethernet/PBT for their mobile backhaul applications. Reminding us that this, after all, is what PBT was originally created for, rather than a replacement for MPLS. One should never manage business strategy by press release, but perhaps other carriers will also inconveniently choose Ethernet/PBB/PBT solutions for applications such as access and backhaul.

Whilst there has been much talk of simplifying MPLS at lower cost, your diarist has seen few concrete results in this area. Sprint is said to focus on operational excellence, so its selection of Ethernet/PBT for backhaul will doubtless receive closer attention from the industry at large.

So enough technology, already! Carrier Ethernet is a maturing market, signified by innovation moving away from raw technology towards operational and management areas such as service automation. And also, it must be said, signified by continuing supplier consolidation.

Today's conference has focused on mobile applications — where the need for future Ethernet-based microwave and backhaul systems is certain (if only to save the operational costs of cabling in the RAN and on a longer timescale than many seem to expect). And also business services — where much effort is focused on ensuring that Carrier Ethernet services meets enterprise requirements. "Enterprise Ethernet", anyone?

VPLS very much to the fore, as might be expected, and an increasing interest in Ethernet over Copper. This is surely the major opportunity in front of Carrier Ethernet: the long-term transition of a huge number of private/leased line TDM services to Ethernet. But first, the industry will need to sort out the best way to support Connection-Oriented Ethernet services. Back to inconvenient technology again!

Across the topic streams, there were over 20 sessions today: surely more than any delegate can rationally assimilate! Service provider presentations from Belgacom, Cable & Wireless, Orange, Telecom Italia, Teragate, THUS and Verizon help to keep our feet on the ground.

Many delegates here relate an extremely busy day, characterised by meetings and discussions, punctuated with presentations of choice. Tomorrow in Berlin promises to bring more of the same as we focus on access, IPTV and packet-optical; plus a special Ofcom-led seminar on Ethernet Active Line Access.

Read more of the CEWC Daily Digest, Day Two >

ECOC exhibition

Components vendors are out to prove that Infinera is not the only game in town when it comes to photonic integrated circuits (PICs). At the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) there are a couple of demos worth pointing out.

First up, tunable laser maker Santur is showing a 100 Gbit/s PIC made out of indium phosphide. The device is a variation on the company's tunable laser technology, which contains an array of 10 lasers with a MEMS device to select the output from one of them. In the 100 Gbit/s PIC, the MEMS device has been replaced by a passive multiplexer, which combines the light from all the 10 Gbit/s lasers (running at the same time) onto a single fibre.

The company claims that its device offers a simple solution for distances up to 10 km, in access networks and short reach interconnects. It could potentially be cheaper than the 4x25 Gbit/s or parallel optics schemes that are also being considered for 100 Gbit/s applications.

But Centre for Integrated Photonics (CIP), the former research activity of BT, has gone one better with a demonstration of a 32-channel PIC.

CIP's photonic integration technology, which was unveiled here at the show is based on hybrid integration platform called HyBoard. Indium phosphide active components are mounted onto silicon "daughterboards", which are then flip-chip mounted onto a silica-on-silicon motherboard containing optical waveguides to connect all the components. The platform is self-aligning, and has been designed so that it can be outsourced to a contract manufacturer if volumes require it.

CIP's demonstration, which contains continuous-wave (CW) lasers, showed how the channels could be turned on and off individually, how the power could be balanced across the channels, or tilted to suit the input to an optical amplifer. Inside the package are two monolithically-integrated arrays of 16 lasers each, mounted side-by-side on the HyBoard platform.

The PIC in its current form is intended for WDM-PON, where it could provide a colourless solution for customer premise equipment (CPE). In this application, an array of CW lasers located at the headend sends light down the fibre to the CPE, which contains a reflective SOA that puts the data onto the wavelength, and reflects it back up the fibre to the optical line terminal.

CIP says that the concept could be extended to create a 160 Gbit/s PIC, containing 16 channels at 10 Gbit/s, simply by adding modulators to the package.

Tuesday 23 September 2008, Carrier Ethernet World Congress, Berlin

CARRIER ETHERNET GROWS UP AND SCALES UP
By Mark Lum

Industry analyst Mark Lum

Welcome to my Carrier Ethernet daily diary from the 1st day of the MEF's World congress here in a damp and rainy Berlin! We're here to understand more about the market, meet colleagues from around the world, and debate the further evolution and growth of Carrier Ethernet services, networks and applications. A somewhat abridged diary due to my chairman's duties today, I'll have a more considered diary tomorrow.

Today is all about scalability with a Carrier Ethernet switch/router market worth over $5bn, according to IDC. As MEF founding president Nan Chen presented in his opening address, the technical and operational foundations of Carrier Ethernet have been put in place over the past four years and the MEF is now making progress in more complex areas such as E-NNI and security, and opening up new applications such as mobile backhaul and wholesale access interconnect services.

The heat of the technology and protocol wars fought over the past couple of years seems to have dissipated. But can victory be declared or is this just a lull in activities while the various factions regroup armed with new standards? What are carriers really looking for? Speak it softly, but I understand that even SDH may not be as dead as many here assume.

MPLS simplification is the technology theme, in order to provide an effective packet transport network. With the mutation of T-MPLS to MPLS-TP - and formal RFCs expected in 12-18 months' time - and ongoing standardisation of PBB-TE, the overt technology wars have definitely abated since last year's CEWC. I suspect many are waiting to see how the MPLS-TP work will meet the operational needs of carriers. In the meantime, PBB-TE focused vendors will not stop their marketing efforts, so I expect another interesting year ahead as the path towards Connection-Oriented Ethernet continues to be mapped out. I also expect a lively 9-vendor panel debate, covering the complete spectrum of Carrier Ethernet technologies.

Once again EANTC has produced another must-see Carrier Ethernet interoperability showcase. Larger than ever, 28 vendors have worked to set up a fully interworked test network comprising over 110 different products with over 330 separate test items. Once again, the focus is on multi-vendor VPLS/MPLS, PBB-TE and T-MPLS metro domains with an IP/MPLS core domain, demonstrating the technical interworking possibilities. Microwave backhaul equipment is a notable growth area at the interop and I'm sure I'll return to this important topic later in the week!

Read more of the CEWC Daily Digest, Day One >

Rod Alferness, chief scientist, Bell Labs.

Trying to predict the future is a good way to invite egg on face, as many people throughout the ages have discovered. But yet that's exactly what plenary speakers are expected to do when they take to the stage, and at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in Brussels today it was the turn of Rod Alferness, chief scientist at Bell Labs.

Alferness had been asked to talk on the same topic at ECOC in Madrid 10 years ago, and before looking forward to the next 10 years, he took the opportunity to look back to see how his predictions had turned out.

Back then 1 Tbit/s had already been demonstrated, so transmission was essentially a solved problem. The real issue for the optical networking industry at the time was how to "manage and tame" all this bandwidth. Mesh and reconfigurable networks based on ROADMs looked like the optimum solution, and in fact that has turned out to be the case, even if it has taken a little longer to arrive than expected (no rotten tomatoes so far).

But going forward, increasing transmission capacity will not be so easy. The belief that fibre has unlimited bandwidth has been overturned. "I think that in the next 10 years we are going to be very challenged to find the bandwidth that society demands of us in a cost-effective way," Alferness said.

The fundamental drivers for bandwidth growth aren't going away, the opposite in fact, as new applications like high-definition TV, video on demand, and 3D video-conferencing could stimulate demand in an unprecedented way, particularly if the bottleneck in the access network is tackled.

While there are differences of opinion on how much bandwidth will grow, even the most conservative estimates suggest that some significant advances in network technology will be required. Alferness presented a chart showing how the capacity demonstrated by "hero experiments" is increasing far more slowly than before. "In the past we would have said a breakthrough was required," he observed.

Although it's impossible to predict what that breakthrough could be, advanced modulation formats, which make more efficient use of fibre spectrum, are definitely part of the picture, and so is photonic integration. "It is absolutely clear in my mind that substantial integration is going to be critical [to high-capacity transmission]," he said.

Ultimately Alferness believes that optical components will be integrated with electronics. "I think 10 years ago we thought optics had all the answers, now I think optics and electronics are going to have to work together," Alferness proposed.

The marriage of optics and electronics could take place in either indium phosphide materials and silicon photonics, which could turn out to be very interesting technology race. However, the horizontal nature of the business model will complicate the investment case for new components technologies, he warns.

The next 10 years

Here's Alferness' take on other trends for the industry over the next 10 years:

• On the overall network: It will be one network. Increasingly the data layer and the optical layer are converging. If we have intelligent routers at the edge of the network, the efficiency of that network is going to be improved.
• On green issues: Energy and carbon footprint will be critically important as we design new optical systems, and it will influence the decisions that are made on technology, particularly decisions about architecture.

• On WDM-PON: WDM-PON will happen at least to enterprises if not to homes.
• On wireless: Wireless needs an interconnection network, which is provided by optical. Fibre networks that go out to homes will also go out to wireless base stations to provide backhaul.
• On multiple antennas: Base stations should talk to each other. 3–5 base stations could provide communications to a single user, by strengthening the signal instead of interfering with one another. But they can only do that if there is an ubiquitous low-cost interconnect between base stations, and that's optical, obviously.

• On network storage: Increasingly we will put storage in the network, closer to the end user to reduce transmission requirements. But its' a wild card: more storage in the network means more content will available to users, which will help to drive traffic.
• On telepresence: We need to offer people the opportunity to really get together without travelling, whether that's telepresence or something else. We have flattened the world, and built a global community, and people will be looking for more personal ways to communicate.

• On in-home networks: We will see wireless networks based on femtocell base stations. Initially the broadband connection in your home will backhaul the traffic, in future, femtocells may also serve traffic coming down your road.

• On quantum computing: Is it the Google of the next decade? Quantum computing enables massively parallel operations. It could perform searches several orders of magnitude faster than today's searches, and in 10 years we're going to need something that does searches that much faster.

Most headlines involving Google seem to involve "world domination", and yesterday's article from The Times online stuck to the theme, as it reports that Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own "computer navy".

In fact, Google has applied some lateral thinking to the problem of how to power its energy-hungry data centres. It's latest idea is to create floating data centres located up to 7 miles (11 km) from shore, in 50 to 70 m of water. If perfected, this approach could be used to build 40 mW data centres powered and cooled by the ocean.

If you're reading this then obviously the world didn't end on Wednesday, when that huge particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, got fired up for the first time over at CERN in Geneva. Although I should point out that no particles have actually collided yet — the LHC team hopes that will happen next week.

It's not often that particle physics is picked up by the mainstream media, including the BBC and Time magazine. But in any case, I had absolutely no chance of getting away without hearing about it, because I share a building with a bunch of physics boffins — FibreSystems Europe is published by IOP Publishing, which is the not-for-profit publishing arm of the UK Institute of Physics. Indeed, colleague Jon Cartwright, reporter on physicsworld.com, was blogging from the control room at CERN on the big day.

Getting LHC to work is a massive achievement, but it's only the start. With each experiment, the LHC will be generating a galactic quantity of data, and a someone has to provide the network to distribute the data to the LHC's partner organisations for processing.

When I say it will be a huge quantity of data, consider this: one experiment alone requires 1,000 one-Gbit/s ports, necessitating rather a lot of new infrastructure. LHC researchers even had to design radiation resistant fibre to carry the data away from the experiments.

From CERN the data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 computing nodes for subsequent further distribution and analysis, providing almost 7000 scientists in around 500 institutes and universities with data from the LHC experiments. National research and education networks (NREN) around the world are getting ready to take the strain, including Europe's pan-European NREN GEANT2.

Some of the networking vendors to benefit include Force10 Networks, whose TeraScale E-series switch/router was selected to support the experiments themselves as well as CERN's computing resources and networks across the Geneva campus.

In addition Ciena's CoreDirector switches were selected by Caltech to support LHCnet, which interconnects the CERN laboratory with Tier-1 access points in Amsterdam, New York and Chicago, and provides onward connections to research facilities throughout the US, including the US Department of Energy (DOE)'s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)'s Science Data Network, the Internet2 network and National Lambda Rail (NLR).

Yes, 10th September was a big day for physics, but it was also a big day for networking.

~~~~~~~~~

If you're interested in the physics going on at the LHC, then physicsworld.com has all the details:
LHC finally gets ready for action
LHC switchon: a preview
Mission complete for LHC team

For a lighter take on what it's all about, check out this YouTube video from science writer Katherine McAlpine (Alpinekat):

What's in a name? Quite a lot judging by the fuss that's surrounding the tradeshow formerly known as NXTcomm. For 2009, the show will get a new look and a new (old) name: SuperComm.

SuperComm, you may recall, was the name of very successful tradeshow owned by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) for 18 years.

Mission party with translators on the way to meetings at CIOE

During 3–10 September, the UK's Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) and UK Trade & Investment are leading a mission to China. Representatives from ten UK photonics companies will be participating with the aim of exploring technology brokering and international trade opportunities between China and the UK.

Here's an excerpt from the UK Photonics KTN Mission to China blog over on sister website optics.org, where you can go to read the full story.

By Glenn Barrowman, ICT Hub Manager at Aston Science Park, UK

Today Alistair Wilson, the director of the UK Photonics KTN, attended the China Optoelectronics Industry CEO Summit and we are delighted to bring you a few insights from the seminar. Fortunately this activity was in simultaneous translation.

Alistair thought that the importance of Asia-Pacific in the global optoelectronics market was underlined by a presentation from US company Finisar, one of the leading data networking equipment companies in the world with its headquarters in Northern California.

Top Gear, the hugely successful BBC motoring program, has an item called the "Cool Wall", which provides a completely subjective way of ranking cars, and now Rudolf van der Berg, a telecommunications consultant living in The Netherlands, has decided to do the same for the telecoms industry. You can enjoy it on his blog at Internet Thought.

Thanks to fiberevolution for bringing this to my attention. What we need now is for someone to devise a graphical, interactive version of this subzero idea. Any takers?