There goes the neighborhood

Stephen M. Hardy

Editor in Chief

The moving van chugs down the tree-lined streets of your suburban neighborhood and stops before the old Fenster house. Its arrival holds your attention for only a moment; plenty of moving vans have come and gone on your street in the dozen or so years you`ve lived here. It will be nice to see some life in the Fenster place again, you think to yourself before you return your gaze to the morning paper.

Toward noon, while you`re watering your lawn, you squint through the bright sunlight to watch the movers unload the truck. That modern furniture will be somewhat out of place in an old house like that, you note. And the new neighbors have enough audio and video equipment to start a disco. These folks will bear watching, it would appear.

A week later, that initial mote of concern has grown into full-blown anxiety. The Fensters` white picket fence is now purple. The new family performs Tai Chi exercises on the lawn each morning at eight--on stilts. They don`t watch football, they don`t play poker, and when they invite you over for a barbecue, they serve you tofu pups. You don`t know who they are, where they come from, or what they want. All you know is that the neighborhood will never be the same.

I get the feeling that the fiber-optic neighborhood will never be the same now that companies like Cisco Systems and Ascend Communications have moved in. Things have become fairly comfortable in Fiberville over the last few years. Folks have prospered, thanks to the boom in bandwidth demand and the ability of Synchronous Optical Network (sonet) technology to manage high-capacity traffic streams. Sure, the fact that data demands have driven this run on bandwidth led some radicals to talk about Asynchronous Transfer Mode (atm), but so what--you can run atm over sonet, no problem. Fiberville`s prosperity was built on sonet, and it may have been easy for its citizens to go to bed at night thinking that if sonet was good enough in the past, it certainly will be good enough now and in the future.

But prosperity always draws the attention of outsiders--and outsiders always do things differently. Thus, as data switch manufacturers such as Cisco and Ascend saw the growth in data traffic as their gateway to backbone markets, it`s not surprising that their approach to optical networks would be different than that of Fiberville`s establishment. "sonet? Who needs sonet?" they seem to say, heedless of the heresy those words represent in their new community.

The immediate response from anyone who has listened to the datacom companies closely is, of course, "You do." Representatives from both Cisco and Ascend (as well as the optical multiplexing companies that have allied with them) have been careful to say that it`s only the aggregation aspects of sonet infrastructure that they aim to remove--at least initially. Both companies use sonet framing to provide network management and control.

Yet when you join the philosophy of the datacom companies with that of the companies working on all-optical networks--and the provision of network management at the optical layer--you begin to wonder if the question "Who needs sonet?" may soon be a legitimate one. As functions such as automatic protection switching become incorporated into new network elements, the allure of plugging IP or atm traffic directly into the optical layer may prove difficult to resist.

Certainly this notion appears to have captured the imaginations of several of the "new breed" carriers. These companies represent the first markets for data pioneers like Cisco and Ascend.

But what about the established carriers, the ones who already have millions (if not billions) invested in a sonet-based, circuit-switched infrastructure? My gut tells me this is the market that established fiber-optic transmission houses will have to target as they retool their product lines to meet the challenge posed by the data-switching companies.

It will be interesting to see how successful the traditional transmission houses will be in fending off the datacom interlopers. One thing is for sure, though: The old neighborhood will never be the same again.