Invitations have gone out for a ground-breaking test of metro DWDM equipment, sponsored by
Light Reading.
The test will be conducted jointly by
Williams Communications Group Inc., the Fiber Optic Networking Laboratory of the
University of Tulsa (Oklahoma), and
Network Test Inc., the test house that has conducted several other bakeoffs for
Light Reading. Test equipment will come from
Spirent Communications.
The involvement of Williams in the test underscores the carrier's interest in evaluating metro DWDM equipment for its own network. Like many other carriers, it wants to find a cost-effective way of funneling traffic from broadband access networks into its high-capacity, long-haul backbone.
This particular test will focus on the optical layer of metro DWDM equipment and will include evaluation of:
- Fault Management
- Performance monitoring
- Provisioning
- Long-term BER (bit error rate) testing
- Linear APS (automatic protection switching) testing
- BLSR (bidirectional line-switched ring) testing
- UPSR (unidirectional path switched ring) testing
- Features
- Price
Participating vendors must supply at least three boxes equipped with a mix of OC12 (622 Mbit/s), OC48 (2.5 Gbit/s), OC192 (10 Gbit/s), and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
For more details, see the test plan at
http://networktest.com/opt02/opt02meth.html.
As with all tests sponsored by
Light Reading, vendors pay nothing to participate, thus ensuring the independence of the results. The importance of this issue was emphasized recently in our April
Research Poll.
Testing is planned for July and August. The following vendors have been invited to take part:
Phew!
If we've left anybody out, please let us know on the message board linked to this article, or by getting in touch with David Newman, president of Network Test, at
[email protected].
— Peter Heywood, Founding Editor,
Light Reading http://www.lightreading.com
