AT&T says it has implemented a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer to deliver a 100 gigabits-per-second optical wavelength on a production network. The deployment, said to be a first with multi-vendor interoperability, was in the Dallas, TX area.  AT&Ts new network provided the connection of two IP multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) routers with transponders and ROADMs from Ciena and Fujitsu.

Andre Fuetsch, President and CTO at AT&T Labs writes in a blog that the company is pursuing two goals with new ROADMs: 1. software control and 2. open hardware specs. Fuetsch also said the new ROADM is an industry-first, multi-vendor interoperability implementation.

“We recently implemented in the Dallas area a 100 gigabit per second optical wavelength in our production network using Open ROADM-compliant technology,” he wrote.

Controlling and managing the optical network is done via the NetConf/YANG APIs and information models defined in the Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement standards. This is an industry-first demonstration of model-driven control and management of optical equipment. The 100G wavelength was provisioned using an SDN ROADM Controller developed by Fujitsu and integrated into the AT&T ECOMP architecture.

Learn more about the project and see the latest specs and project participants at OpenROADM.org.

AT&T says it “welcomes new suppliers and service providers to join our open ecosystem!”

Reference:  Getting on the same wavelength with Open ROADMs: Industry’s first interoperable optical equipment up and running in Dallas area

In a 2015 research note, Global Industry Analysts forecast that the worldwide reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) market would surpass $10.8 billion by 2020. The firm saw much of that growth coming from the need for data, video, and voice service providers to address the immense network traffic generated by the likes of social networks, data center virtualization, file sharing, video downloads, cloud computing, and online gaming.