PTN prime time is here
The moment has arrived for PTN, hear delegates at Packet Transport Networks in Milan.
“The toughest question I get asked is ‘how big is the Packet Optical Transport market?’ Andrew Schmitt of Infonetics Research told delegates at Packet Transport Networks in Milan. The problem was that everyone had a different definition of what the market was, he said. “Defining packet optical is a path-dependent problem. What you need depends on what you did before, the decisions you made years ago. Everyone has different requirements and is looking for different types of equipment.”
Packet traffic would grow five times over by 2014, Amit Bhardwaj of Cisco Systems told the conference, driven by video and mobile data. “Customers are going to expect access to applications and data from anywhere and any device.” However, new revenue models were emerging, with customers willing to pay for the right product, he said. “People won’t pay for YouTube but they’ll pay for HD video. If you don’t overbuild your business, and run it to the extent of what it’s built for, you can maximise your profit.” Organisations could exploit the fluidity of technologies and set themselves apart from slower-moving providers, he said.
“I won’t be the 10,000th person to tell you that IP traffic is growing,” said Massimo Leo of Alcatel-Lucent. “But you do need to make your network scalable – SDH is not efficient enough. PTN is under execution – this is a reality today.” Standards had been specified and platforms were available, he stressed. “Packet Transport Networks are for real and under deployment now – it’s PTN prime-time. But you need to make sure you get the right stuff – innovation and experience make the difference for execution in line with operators’ strategic drivers.”
The industry was at a crossroads, Luc Cueppens of Juniper Networks told delegates. Whereas the first decade of this century had been about digitisation, the next would be about connecting people to that digitised culture, but the unpredictability of applications would inevitably prove to be a challenge. “Services and applications can be controlled by anyone – they’re no longer tied to the people who run the networks.” This had a major impact on the core of the network, he said. “It’s all about efficiency, flexibility and scalability.”
Opportunities existed to bring packet and optical layers together, with different vendors having different solutions, he continued. “The real debate is when does it make sense to create optical expressways?” Current industry thinking on optimisation was that IP traffic was most effectively handled by packet switches, as this allowed dynamic bandwidth allocation and statistical multiplexing. “You can use OTN and MPLS in your network as long as you use them for what they’re best at. Our position is that the best use of available technology is OTN for transport and MPLS for switching.”
Telecom Italia’s requirement for new metro regional networks was a single, connection-oriented network for both fixed and mobile, optimised for packet based traffic and transport of high quality TDM traffic, said Giuseppe Ferraris. Wired access in Italy was still mainly based on copper, around 70 per cent of new handsets registered were still 2G and business customers were still requesting legacy TDM services despite the huge increase in IP traffic. “These customers are happy with these services and the revenues are higher than from new services,” he said. “You can have good results using basic MPLS features, but PTN is more suitable in terms of costs and scalability. In our view, the introduction of PTN is mainly for new traffic. The main focus is the growth of the network – we need efficient transport on carrier-class equipment, powerful and simple OAM tools and fast and reliable protection mechanisms.”
Nicolas Fischbach of Colt Telecom, meanwhile, told delegates about his organisation’s experience of layer two and layer three integration. “Phase one is to tackle access, phase two the edge and phase three the core,” he said, with the latter the most complex. “It’s difficult enough with one vendor but when you bring in dual vendors it becomes even more challenging.” The general strategy was to launch with the main vendor, then close the critical gaps of the second vendor, which required effective umbrella provisioning tools.
Complexity issues around building networks went beyond PTN, Luc Cueppens told the conference. “The challenges are huge. There’s the challenge of legacy – my experience is that nothing gets taken out of the network until it burns out.” PTN would make things more complicated in the short term because of management issues, customer retention issues and other factors, he said.
“The biggest challenge is the generational challenge, but on the other hand there’s tremendous interest in new services,” said Steve West of Cyan Optics. “It’s a learning curve challenge from an operational perspective, but the key to this is intuitive management tools.” On the crucial issue of whether convergence of the optical layer and the packet layer had more impact on CAPEX or OPEX, Luc Cueppens told delegates that while people always spoke about the importance of OPEX, decisions were still made based on CAPEX. “I think the biggest opportunity in the short term is CAPEX,” added Steve West. ‘But the OPEX advantages will become more important over time as you scale up the network.”
“Less is more – if you can avoid complexity on your network, do it,” Alain Marion of MRV Communications told delegates, a sentiment echoed by Jon Baldry of Transmode. “The architecture choices we make today will lay the foundations of the Ethernet convergence wave, so we need to be very careful,” he said. “Transmode’s position is not ‘OTN is bad’ but rather ‘it’s good, but at the right place in the network’. If you’re looking at network simplification there are existing services that require support but not necessarily migration. We need to continue to support legacy through SDH/OTN-based WDM transport services.”
“Build for growth,” he urged delegates. “How much complexity you put into your network will have a huge impact – infrastructure choices you make will impact service flexibility and visibility, cost and scalability.”
“The bottom line is that when we run networks we run multi-layer networks,” said Steve West. “The most important thing you can do to reduce your costs is have an integrated management environment that takes advantage of all these technologies.”
