ALCATEL OUTLINES ITS OPTICAL ROADMAP
Alcatel outlined major products in its plan to offer a complete optical networking solution extending from components to systems and from undersea to terrestrial network construction.  Key products in the portfolio will include:

Optinex Crosslight - a new photonic based optical cross connect offering up to 4,000 ports of transparent wavelength management and restoration.

Optinex 1600 - a family of existing optical gateways able to groom complete wavelengths or fractions of wavelengths, including visibility and monitoring of any SONET or SDH payloads.

Optinex 1640 - its existing DWDM long-haul system that will be expanded to offer up to 240 wavelengths, and up to 40 Gbps line rates.

Alcatel 770 Routing Core Platform - a new product for the service layer, initially offering 640 Gbps of IP capacity and scaling to terabit levels. Interfaces will support wire speed forwarding, with MPLS and differentiated services based on QoS.

Alcatel 1300 Integrated Network Manager - Multi-service and multi-vendor network management for IP and Time Division Multiplex circuits, dynamic allocation of end-to-end services, and fully automated operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning features to guarantee QoS.
http://www.usa.alcatel.com/events/suprcomm2000/press/scpr_060700_2.htm
Alcatel, June 7, 2000

• Separately, Alcatel announced that Bell Canada has chosen its Optical Gateway Cross-Connect to migrate its traditional broadband management points to all optical, large hub offices.  Alcatel's crossconnect combines traditional broadband digital cross-connect technology with optical layer and data management.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

ALCATEL ANNOUNCES DWDM DISTANCE/CAPACITY ACHIEVEMENTS
Alcatel reported progress in extending the distance/capacity of optical networks.  In one trial, Alcatel achieved a 3,000-km transmission of 80 DWDM channels at 10 Gbps each, using Raman amplification.  The dual-stage hybrid Erbium/Raman amplifiers were spaced out at 80 km each, the same spacing already found in current long-haul networks.  In the second trial, the company demonstrated a 250-km unrepeatered transmission span with 32 channels at 40 Gbps each.  This trial used Raman amplification distributed along the span, and enhanced large-effective-area fibers, which minimize nonlinear power conversion and improve receiver sensitivity.  Alcatel said it expects 40 Gbps rates to yield an overall reduction in cost because of the four-fold reduction in channel usage over 10 Gbps. Technology used in each experiment would be commercialized "soon."  http://www.usa.alcatel.com/events/suprcomm2000/press/scpr_060700_3.htm
Alcatel, June 7, 2000

AVANEX DEVELOPS "WAVELENGTH TO THE DESKTOP" APPLICATION
Avanex announced plans for a "Wavelength to the Desktop" Application that would use its Wavelength Channel Processor to deliver voice, data, video, and wavelength services over metro or even enterprise networks. Avanex said its Wavelength Channel Processor would offer a cost-effective solution providing protocol and bit-rate independent optical add-drop capability without the need for amplifiers.  The technology is being tested in a commercial-campus field trial in Hong Kong.

Avanex also introduced its latest PowerExpress photonic processor, which is designed for eliminating electrical regeneration on long-haul optical networks.  The processor provides full bit-rate and data format transparency, and supports multiple reconfigurable wavelength add-drop nodes, with no need of Raman amplification and no need of FEC and RZ coding.  http://www.avanex.com
Avanex, June 7, 2000

SIROCCO INTRODUCES WAVELENGTH SWITCH FOR REGIONAL CORE NETWORKS
Sirocco Systems introduced a multi-Service, multi-Wavelength switch for the core of regional networks.  The Sirocco Tornado-F1 Regional Core Switch (RCS) is a 480-gigabit, high-density optical switch  supporting up to twenty-four OC-192 ports or ninety-six OC-48 ports, which can be freely mixed on a per-slot basis. All interfaces are software-configurable for full wavelength switching or STS/STM level switching, down to STS-1 granularity.  The platform could serve for regional aggregation and switching onto a long haul optical core.  The optical switching would be based on Sirocco's Bi-directional Path Switched Mesh (BPSM) suite of network-level protection schemes; and on signaling protocols including Optical Domain Service Interconnect (ODSI), Multi-Protocol Lambda Switching (MPLS), and Sirocco's own DiVA-based signaling. Customer trials are expected this summer.  http://www.siroccosystems.com/news/press20000607_01.html
Sirocco Systems, June 7, 2000

• Yesterday, Sycamore Networks announced plans to acquire Sirocco for $2.9 billion.

AMBER NETWORKS' OPTICAL AGGREGATION ROUTER ENCAPSULATES TRAFFIC IN IP/MPLS
Amber Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, unveiled an aggregation service router designed to groom TDM, Frame Relay, ATM or IP traffic onto core optical backbones.  The Amber ASR2000 will concentrate multi-service access feeds and convert, multiplex, and encapsulate this traffic for transport over high-speed IP/Optical backbones.   The architecture uses IP/MPLS as its underlying service carriage.  Amber Networks is developing a fault tolerant router operating system (OS) designed to ensure full route state resiliency (without service interruption) for the most popular routing protocols, such as BGP-4, IS-IS, and OSPF.   The Amber platform will offer the routing capacity to support very high port density, with the equivalent of 672 T1 ports in less than 6 inches of rack space or 10,000 T1 ports for a single seven-foot telco rack. http://www.ambernetworks.com/asr2000.html
Amber Networks, June 6, 2000

• Amber Networks is led by Sam Mathan, who previously was with Ascend Communications and later served as the senior vice president for Telco marketing and sales of the resulting Lucent Technologies Internetworking Systems division.  The company was co-founded by Amar Gupta, an early ATM pioneer who helped developed the StrataCom BPX platform (now part of Cisco Systems).

VITESSE TAPS IBM SIGE FOR OPTICAL CHIPS
Vitesse Semiconductor will use IBM's silicon germanium (SiGe) technology for use in its next generation of low-power communications ICs. In addition to manufacturing the chips, IBM will help Vitesse to optimize SiGe for optical applications.  http://www.ibm.com
IBM, June 7, 2000

ASTROTERRA TESTS 1 GBPS SATELLITE TO EARTH LASER
AstroTerra successfully launched into low earth orbit an experimental Space Technology Research Vehicle-2 (STRV-2) that will test satellite-to-ground communication lasers operating at 1 Gbps.  The LEO satellite will attempt to establish a high-bandwidth laser link to Table Mountain, California, with slant ranges up to 2000 km.  http://www.astroterra.com/
AstroTerra, June 7, 2000

PSINET ACQUIRES EXTENSIVE EUROPEAN DARK FIBER FROM VIATEL
PSINet purchased over 14,000 kms of dark fiber on Viatel's Pan-European Network.  The deal also includes co-location space in over 50 of Viatel's co-location centers and POPs.  Financial terms were not disclosed.  http://www.viatel.com
Viatel, June 7, 2000

AT&T CABLE SERVICES TO TEST ISP CHOICE
AT&T Cable Services will begin testing how multiple ISPs could offer broadband Internet access over its hybrid fiber-coaxial network.  The six-month trial will begin in November and be limited to 500 customers in Boulder, Colorado.  http://www.att.com/press/item/0,1354,2951,00.html
AT&T, June 7, 2000

• Currently, Excite@Home is the exclusive provider on AT&T's cable network.

ZAFFIRE RAISES $85 MILLION IN 3^RD ROUND FUNDING
Zaffire, a start-up developing optical solutions for metro/regional networks, raised $85 million in third round venture financing.  Investors include Integral Capital Partners, OppenheimerFunds, J&W Seligman & Company, Carlyle Internet Partners Europe, Azure Capital Partners, JT Venture Partners, Kinetic Ventures, Octane Capital Management, Pilgrim Baxter Hyper Partners, Bank of America Securities, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Juniper Networks, and MRV Communications.  http://www.zaffire.com
Zaffire, June 7, 2000

• Zaffire's Z3000 platform for metro hub aggregation provides transparent and opaque wavelength transport services to existing equipment, including SONET, SDH and Gigabit Ethernet at speeds from 155 Mbps to 10 Gbps.  Zaffire's architecture leverages a Fractional Wavelength technology to multiplex diverse traffic types (IP, ATM, Frame Relay, Gigabit Ethernet, Voice and TDM) within a single wavelength.  At the same time, traffic can be packed efficiently across wavelengths and appear as a single trunk to the network.  MPLS is used to maintain QoS.  The platform scales to 256 wavelengths (up to 2.5 Tbps) on a fiber pair using 50 GHz channel spacing.  Zaffire uses a digital wrapper monitoring technology to provide non-intrusive performance monitoring of end-to-end wavelength quality.  The company is led by Tony Lavia, who previously served as vice president and general manager of the ATMnet business unit at Newbridge Networks.