All-Optical Networks 2001
Conference Agenda for Thursday February 8, 2001

Dr. Chien-Yu Kuo
Executive Vice President, CTO & Founder
Cinta Corporation

This presentation will focus on the historical evolution of the optical core cross-connect and the pros and cons of deploying all-optical, opto- electronic and hybrid networks. Scalability, manageability and efficiency are paramount concerns for next-generation carriers. They must be able to rapidly manage, provision and restore services across the network in order to remain competitive. An integrated transport and cross-connection architecture reduces the overall network footprint and inefficient energy consumption, while maintaining speed and signal integrity. In determining the benefits of deploying an integrated architecture and the requirements for meeting manageability, scalability and efficiency concerns, carriers must take the next step in evolving their core optical transport equipment.

Kent Novak
Vice President
Geyser Networks

The need of service providers to be able to provision an increasingly wider range of line rates has severely tested the flexibility of legacy networks. This session will look at how network operators can protect their existing network investments, continue to enjoy the reliability advantages of SONET, and be able to better meet the increased granularity requirements of their customers.

Rashmi Doshi
CTO
Everest Broadband Networks

Jack Lodge
Director of Product Offerings
GiantLoop Network

Dave Schaeffer
Founder & CEO
Cogent Communications

William (Rick) Talbot

Network planners for several service providers will discuss their views on what is needed to better provision and manage services in today's increasingly data-centric network and share their experiences with today's optical networking platforms. What approaches and technologies do they see as providing the best migration path to a next-generation network? Is a purely photonic Internet required for them to meet their customers' needs?

Krishna Bala
CTO & Founder
Tellium

Doug Green
Vice President
Ocular Networks

Dana Hartgraves
Vice President
Metro-Optix

Octavio Morales
Vice President
World Wide Packets

David Yates
Vice President
Atrica

This session will look at the impact of the explosion in data traffic (doubling every 6-9 months) on access networks and how differing approaches (e.g., SONET, gigabit Ethernet) are being applied to address the challenges.

Fredrik Hånell
Vice President of Marketing Worldwide
Dynarc

Optical networking equipment provides the bandwidth that carriers need to build high-speed networks. But to make money from those networks, they need something else: service-provisioning products - specifically, the hardware and software that allows carriers to manage their networks, and automatically allocate capacity, track usage, and provide stats for billing.

As both businesses and residential customers become more sophisticated, they are looking for more advanced services on demand and at lower price points. For service providers to be successful in retaining and gaining new customers, they need to intelligently distribute bandwidth and automatically provision a variety of robust services within seconds. Is router-based provisioning just a clever idea in theory with a complicated and time- consuming reality, or has it arrived and ready to provide speedy service for customers now? This session will examine these challenges and assess what is available to service providers today and what will be needed in the future to provide billable bandwidth on demand.

Vijay Aggarwal
CTO & Founder
Gotham Networks

The explosion of wireless devices and higher-bandwidth applications like video on demand, dedicated DSL and cable modem access exacerbate weak points on any network. Heightened by the increasing chasm between the growth capacity of optical networks and the growth capacity in the deployment of broadband access lines, service providers cannot keep up with the technology needed at the network's edge to bridge the gap between the electrical access network and the optical core network. Behind in the game, service providers are constantly trying to keep up with the onslaught of new technologies and traffic, only to fall behind again in responding to customers' needs and failures in the network. Expenses, time and difficulty to implement, integrate, provision and operate the varying devices that exist on the edge today to enhance network performance are slowing down the network and preventing service providers from optimizing the benefits of optical networking.

Bottlenecks often mean sub-optimal response times or frequent service disruptions that affect Quality of Service guarantees, violate SLA deliverables, increase customer dissatisfaction, and ultimately hurt a service provider's revenues. Traditionally, network managers fixed bottlenecks by purchasing more switches and routers, and configuring them either side-by- side with existing gear, or front-ending the existing gear. Either configuration approach adds "layers" of complexity to the edge network, and carries so much operational overhead as to restrict network service providers from capitalization on the immense advances in optical core bandwidth with high-margin, value-added services.

This session will discuss approaches that are available to fix bottlenecks and exploit the benefits of optical networking. Looking at new technology breakthroughs, such as "virtualizing" multiple hardware boxes into one distributed hardware stack, the discussion will explore various theories that will describe how network managers can "collapse" the layers in the edge network, reduce costs and network failures. Through a discussion of different technology architectures, this session will relate how collapsing the layers of the network can allow network managers to scale three- dimensionally: in service types, in I/O beyond the physical platform, and in performance. Attendees will come away with an understanding of how to better implement, and provision new services without creating more "layers" and cost, traditionally associated with network edge technology.

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