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"We Have the Experience"
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ViewsLetter on
Provisioning 29 Sept
2003 #30
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A fortnightly look at provisioning automation.
FCC 'TRIENNIAL REVIEW' OF UNBUNDLED NETWORK ELEMENTS: Part 2
DARK FIBER REMAINS UNE, MAY BE DARK HORSE OF PROVISIONING
William A. Flanagan, Editor and Publisher
Last time, reviewing the Federal Communications Commission's recent
Order regarding the unbundled network elements (UNEs) that incumbent
local exchange carriers (ILECs) must make available to other carriers,
we noted that almost all rights to the outside plant, or local loops,
will soon be in the hands of the ILECs. The one unexpected
exception that emerges from a close reading of the Order is dark fiber.
Offering dark fiber (just the glass, Mam) is something that many
carriers resisted. Leasing DF means giving up control of how much
capacity the customer uses--now the lease holder can pump as much as he
wants through the fiber. Traditionally, carriers benefited from
improvements like multiplexing, but on DF it's the tenant who gets to
put on his own muxes to increase capacity when needed.
The cost of DF under the FCC guidelines will be based on the future
cost for an efficient installation--which might actually be less than
the original cost. (ILECs have been claiming that all UNE pricing
is below cost, a claim not universally acknowledged by others in the
industry).
This arrangement may not be too bad for some ILEC who installed tons of
fibers but lit only a small portion of them. Isn't it better to
get something for otherwise idle property? Not that there's a
glut everywhere, but some FO cables hold over 600 fibers.
Competitive LECs should be eager to use fibers that give access to
multi-unit office buildings, campuses, apartments, and upscale suburban
developments. But then what? How will they "provision
services"?
Best bet for leased outside plant is something all-passive, such as
Passive Optical Network (PON). The big question is how many
wavelengths to install from the start--might be one, could be a dozen,
depending on the market. The bit rate can be decided later, per
wavelength--one of the beauties of dark fiber.
To automate the provisioning requires new Customer Premises Equipment
(CPE), which must accept new firmware while on-line. With enough
processing power in the hardware, and a fast detector, a CLEC could
start out at a lower transmission speed, then crank it up from OC-3 to
GigEnet when there's a need for more bandwidth. Note that the
previous sentence also included a format change, something that should
be available per wavelength. For that matter, no reason a laser's
bit speed can't be increased the same way. (BTW, the PON forum
www.ponforum.org has links to vendors who offer some of these features
today).
Besides speed, what needs to be configurable is wavelength.
Tunable lasers exist, but they are too expensive today to deploy unless
needed. But volume production (or a clever designer/manufacturer)
could change that next month. Let's assume CPE will have control
of both wavelength and bit rate, configurable in software (no truck
roll).
Not quite Heaven on Earth, but enough tools for flexible
deployments. For example, with the proper wave division
multiplexers (WDMs) in the outside plant, a CPE could change wavelength
to switch to a backup service. Eventually, the WDMs will be
configurable too, but may require electrical (or optical??) power to
change configuration (nano-mirrors, non-linear effects?).
On the customer side, CPE still needs interfaces to the usual
suspects: IP over Ethernet, video, analog POTS voice, and
probably circuit emulation for Storage Area Networks (SANs) and
mainframes (ESCON).
Will the ILECs survive leasing out their dark fiber? We may see,
but we may not. What if the ILECs needed cash ("to build out our
broadband infrastructure to residential areas")? Would they sell
all their fiber and lease back only what they need? Would that
put all that unused fiber in the ground out of the reach of
CLECs?
Stay tuned.
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Updated: 17 July 2004 2003
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