Polaris: Let’s Get Small

Polaris Networks Inc. will take the wraps off its first commercial product at NFOEC next week in Dallas. The vendors says its new OMX optical transport switch revolutionizes the world of digital cross-connects by providing a scalable, multifunction product that consumes significantly less power and space and is far simpler to manage than any DCS currently on the market.

Combining DCS and SONET add/drop functionality for the metro core, the OMX goes up against digital cross-connect solutions from industry leaders Tellabs, with its 5500 box, and Alcatel, with its 1631 product, among others, says Sab Gosal, director of product marketing at Polaris. Both existing products made their initial debuts in the early 1990s, says Gosal, and both were originally wideband DS1 and later DS3 boxes with fiber optic interfaces added more recently. Still, despite their evolution, says Gosal, these products have not sufficiently evolved with operator demand. “These are huge hunks of iron that are hard to manage and consume huge [amounts] of power and space,” he says.

Gosal claims the Polaris system is 20 times less expensive to house and power than competing, legacy solutions. The OMX also has lower initial costs and faster time-to-revenue due to automated management, he says.

According to Gosal, a 1,024 STS1 footprint on a Tellabs or Alcatel system would cost about $6 million while the Polaris solution costs around $1 million. “There’s a dramatic reduction in the capital expenditure,” he says.

As for network management, Polaris is using a non-standard version of GMPLS to allow its network elements to work with existing operational environments and enable carriers to bring up services more quickly and inexpensively. Gosal says Polaris is not using GMPLS for service creation or circuit creation, as some vendors are purporting to do, but rather to allow service providers to understand the topology of all their central offices. That will allow carriers to do load shifting between offices, providing news cost efficiencies and scale, he says. That can also eliminate the need for a truck roll to a central office every time a new service is turned up, he says, adding “GMPLS lets you do that from a remote operations center in a matter of seconds.” That’s opposed to the 40- to 100-day provisioning delay to bring up a T1 on existing infrastructure, he says.

The OMX collapses wideband (DS1 or VT1.5), broadband (DS3 and STS-1) and super broadband (STS12 and above) functionality in one fabric. The solution scales from 240 gigabits to 2 terabits of full, non-blocked switched capacity. Gosal says others max out around 170gigabits.

Polaris is targeting the product at new service providers; existing carriers with new deployments; and IXCs and RBOCs that upgrading Tier 1 markets to alleve congestion and/or address network management concerns.

The initial version of the OMX, available now, is TDM-based. That product will be running in four trials, which all begin this month; one trial is with a large IXC, another is with an RBOC and the other two are with next-generation carriers. Gosal expects to Polaris announce its first large carrier contract in the next two to four months, and smaller carrier contracts even sooner.

The next release of OMX, which has a software-driven switching fabric, will allow for packet-based (ATM, IP and Ethernet) grooming, says Gosal. That release is slated for availability in late 2003.

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