Anyone familiar with the wireless industry will have heard of network slicing, and Windstream and Infinera are working to bring the same concept to optical networks by upgrading older ROADM equipment to create a next-generation technology called Node-on-a-Blade. Executives from both companies see this technology as key to enabling edge computing and the proliferation of future 5G use cases.
For more than a decade, ROADM has served as a highway interchange for fibre-optic networks, allowing optical signals to be rerouted along different paths without disruption. art Nichols, vice president of architecture and technology at Windstream, told Fierce that the idea behind Node-on-a-Blade is to reduce the size and cost of these exchanges and add new telemetry points to them to gain a deeper understanding of network performance. to provide greater insight into network performance. This will allow companies like Windstream to sell parts of their networks and show customers the performance of the underlying optical infrastructure in a way that is not possible today.
"Historically, the challenge with things like spectrum products has always been how do I know what the performance is? Does performance degrade over time? How do I know if my optics aren't working properly? If there's a fibre cut, how do I know what the impact is?" Nicholls explains. "If you don't demonstrate that performance at Layer 0, then the purchaser will be completely dependent on the fibre supplier to handle all of this. In this environment, the consumers hosting spectrum services have that visibility themselves."
The rise of technologies such as edge computing and 5G is driving demand for such technologies, noted Infinera's senior vice president of marketing. While it may have previously been more economical for hyperscale enterprises to build their own fibre infrastructure between a handful of data centres, they are now looking for ways to connect 30, 40 or even 50 data centre locations as they strive to push their computing capabilities closer to the edge.
"Building a fibre infrastructure from scratch, which is what these guys have to do, is very difficult," he says. "What this service allows them to do is basically have their own virtual private fibre network without having to lift a shovel ...... They basically own the virtual fibre and then they put whatever optical equipment they want [on it]."
Node-on-a-Blade does not currently exist as a universally available product. To create it, Infinera and Windstream plan to take the existing Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) currently available in ROADM devices and split it into four parts.
While the technology is still under development, validation is expected to begin at the end of this year. Field deployment will begin next year.
"We plan to use this as the cornerstone of a large programme that will really start to scale up in 2023," he said. "This is key to our plans and to the expansion or modernisation of our entire footprint of 6,000 nodes, and we will immediately roll out all the benefits of these types of novel services and core functionality."
