Ciena's Multiwave Coredirector to Provide Intelligent Optical Core for Williams Nationwide Network - Ciena's network switch, William Communications' Multi-Serivce Broadband Network - Company Business and Marketing

Cambridge Telcom Report, Nov 15, 1999

CIENA Corporation has signed a three year agreement with Williams Communications, Inc. Under the contract, Williams Communications is expected to become the first customer to deploy CIENA's MultiWave CoreDirector, the market's first intelligent optical core switch.

"CIENA's CoreDirector is central to Williams' optical network," said Greg Floerke, vice president of engineering and construction for the Williams network. "CoreDirector will provide the high-bandwidth switching, protection and provisioning capabilities for our next generation optical network, making it possible for us to offer our carrier customers switched optical services ranging from wavelengths to protected private line services."

Williams Communications' next-generation long-distance network, the fourth largest in the United States, has 22,600 miles of fiber in the ground and will total 33,000 route miles connecting 125 cities by the end of 2000. The fully-integrated architecture of the Williams Multi-Service Broadband Network couples ATM core switching with advanced optical networking technologies to provide carriers with data, voice, video and Internet services over the platform they choose.

"By choosing CoreDirector as the centerpiece of its optical networking strategy Williams Communications realizes the scalability of terabit optical switching and networking intelligence in the optical core," said Steve Chaddick, president of CIENA's Core Switching Division. "Williams is truly building a next generation optical network and we're proud to be selected as the core."

Pending successful completion of product trial and certification, which is expected in early calendar 2000, CIENA anticipates that Williams Communications will purchase and deploy at least $40 million in CoreDirector systems over the three year term of the contract.

Simpler, Smarter Optical Networks CIENA's MultiWave CoreDirector features the networking intelligence of CIENA's LightWorks OS that will allow Williams to bring on new services faster and realize new revenue more quickly. At the heart of LightWorks OS is the Optical Signaling and Routing Protocol (OSRP), which enables distributed, dynamic information exchange between networked CoreDirectors.

Through the software driven intelligence of OSRP, each CoreDirector is network aware, that is, able to "see" the status of other CoreDirectors, evaluate the state of the network and select the best path for traffic to travel across the network to its destination.

For Williams' carrier customers, the benefit of this intelligence is rapid service delivery through real-time service provisioning, thereby allowing Williams to shorten the time to revenue. The networking intelligence of LightWorks OS dramatically eases the carrier's provisioning burden, enabling Williams to grow and manage its network with fewer operations staff.

"With its LightWorks OS, CIENA has made it possible for carriers to separate the growth of operations tasks from the growth of network traffic," said George Peabody, managing director of telecommunications research at industry analyst, Aberdeen Group. "With deployment of CIENA's CoreDirector, Williams will be able to scale its network and provision services with limited manual intervention."

Peabody continued, "The advantages for Williams are really three-fold: First, Williams benefits from tremendous operational savings associated with not having to hire operational staff at the same pace at which it grows traffic on its network. Second, time-to-revenue is shortened. And third, Williams' customers benefit from real-time service delivery, instead of the weeks, sometimes months, required by other network solutions."

Protection in the Optical Layer To provide its customers with integrated voice and data services, Williams required a scalable switching solution that allowed its network to simultaneously switch and manage multiple traffic types - without sacrificing the protection and reliability afforded by legacy network architectures.

"CoreDirector's unique ability to deliver rapid restoral through a mesh-based protection scheme supports our strategy of offering integrated voice and data services to our targeted carrier market," said Floerke of Williams Communications.

"Most new network architecture approaches require a service provider to force-fit its network to the capabilities of the vendor's products. With CoreDirector, Williams can optimize its network to specific traffic and service demands," said Aberdeen's Peabody.

Through LightWorks OS, CoreDirector supports simultaneous ring, linear line and path-level fast mesh protection, allowing multiple concurrent protection mechanisms including software-defined rings (VLSR), standards-compliant linear APS protection, and FastMesh path-level restoration.

Lower Cost Per Bit CoreDirector's density, scalability, range of optical interfaces, and software-definable switching granularity, eliminate the need for additional SONET/SDH add/drop multiplexers, digital cross-connects, and optical cross-connects in next-generation network architectures. As a result, carriers like Williams Communications benefit from lower network equipment costs and realize the operational savings associated with managing a simpler network architecture.