The future of transport in the metro area

Sat Aug 3 10:58:01 UTC 2019

On 3/Aug/19 03:14, Brandon Martin wrote:

>  
>
> How are they handling optical power balancing across amplifiers and
> such?  Do they just trust the customer to provide light at the power
> levels agreed upon?  Bulk attenuate the entire "spectrum"
> automatically?  Monitor and drop the whole lot if something is out of
> whack and causing saturation or gain balance problems for others?
>
> Or is this something you're only seeing at metro distances where
> separate amplifiers are superfluous?

The details about this are very vendor-specific, and each vendor has
some way in which they implement this. Spectrum would be a very
customized product between the vendor and operator, and also between the
operator and customer. So no BCP for this, as of yet, that I know of.

>   I've inquired with a few metro operators in my area about something
> like this, albeit a few years ago, and I got a pretty hard "no way
> we'd ever do that" out of them presumably for the reasons above.

We are seeing requests from as low as 600km, up to 1,600km, all the way
to 7,000km.

Mark.