Routed optical networks

Mon May 1 20:56:47 UTC 2023

Hi Etienne

In short, the idea is that optical networks are wasteful and routers do a
better job making more use of a network's capacity than ROADMs. Take the
extra router hop (or 3 or 8) versus short-cutting it with an optical
network because the silicon is so low-latency anyway that it hardly makes a
difference now. Putting more GBs per second on fewer strands means saving a
lot of money on infrastructure costs.

400G ZR comes to mind as a foundational technology since it basically made
active optical muxponder equipment obsolete in the metro. The savings here
means telcos/enterprises can afford more router ports, which we've already
established can utilize paths more efficiently anyway. Otherwise, this is
more of a concept and can be executed with a variety of pre-existing
technologies, or someone's new secret sauce that bakes everything together
like SD-WAN did to its constituent technologies.

-Matt

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 12:30 PM Etienne-Victor Depasquale via NANOG <
nanog at nanog.org> wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> Simple question: does "routed optical networks" have a clear meaning in
> the metro area context, or not?
>
> Put differently: does it call to mind a well-defined stack of technologies
> in the control and data planes of metro-area networks?
>
> I'm asking because I'm having some thoughts about the clarity of this
> term, in the process of carrying out a qualitative survey of the results of
> the metro-area networks survey.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Etienne
>
> --
> Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale
> Assistant Lecturer
> Department of Communications & Computer Engineering
> Faculty of Information & Communication Technology
> University of Malta
> Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale
>

-- 
Matt Erculiani
ERCUL-ARIN
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