Diversity - was: Fiber cut in SF area

Wed Apr 15 14:38:45 UTC 2009

Rod Beck wrote:
> That service is probably very expensive.  
>
> There is no known way to provide cheap 10 wave protection. Not carrier grade. Protected 10 GigE service (LAN PHY 10 GigE) will tolerate a very high BER before switching. And the cost of switching STM64 is very high as well. 
>
> Bottom line is that it will cost more than two diversely routed 10 gig waves. 
>
> There is no real market for protected 10 gig waves. Occasionally a bank will request the service, but backoff as soon as they see the price tag. 
>
> "Hopefully none of these customers had service and protect ckts that went down... I would be pissed as a ceo if that happen to my company.  Hopefully level3's new service offering is 100 at percent redundant as stated
>
> The new service offerings include: - Protected Wavelengths: Level 3 now provides automatic protection-switching to a dedicated diversely routed wavelength in the event of a network failure. The protection switch, fully automated and managed by Level 3, happens at switching speeds approaching SONET restoration times. The single interface to the customer requires no additional capital cost for customer optical ports, and the diverse restoration path is fixed and fully known to the customer. These features allow customers to achieve fast restoration with predictable performance in their network without adding significant cost and routing complexity. -"
>   

Surely a simple wideband optomechanical switch, actuated by detected 
signal degradation on a pilot wavelength or wavelengths, would do the 
job with high reliability and relatively low cost, without any extra 
need for switching the STM64 signal at the bitstream level?

-- Neil