The Super Transport blade concept pioneered by JDSU brings all the elements of any given degree in a transport node into a single blade. It collapses the functions of four or five blades in traditional designs into a single-slot envelope. This in turn has a direct bearing on the two key measured metrics of opex : real estate and power consumption. The functions that the blade brings to the customer are:

• Optical line pre-amp
• Route-and-select flex ROADM with a twin 1x20 WSS
• Optical channel monitoring for flex/superchannels
• Post-line amplification
• OSC termination.