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The requirements for regional operators are similar to
that of inter-exchange and enterprise markets, since regional
providers:
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· Create connectivity to central offices for the aggregated
circuit switched telephone traffic
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·
Provide high-speed data channels to businesses which run
diverse protocol suites
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· Provide high-speed access to the home or SOHOs.
This sector may
be divided into three sub sectors:
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· Traditional telephony service (local exchange)
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· High-speed pipes for private business-oriented networks
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· High-speed access networks to support
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· Internet access,
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· High definition television (HDTV),
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· Interactive TV,
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· so on.
Regional networks
combine requirements from both the long-haul providers and data
processing centers. On one hand, such companies aggregate numerous
telephone sources into high-bandwidth SDH rings to connect their
central offices. On the other hand, they supply high-speed data
channels to businesses, which need to run diverse protocol suites on
top of them. In fact, while small enterprises may find the
installation of a WDM link for disaster recovery purposes too
expensive, economy-of-scale considerations enable regional providers
to offer affordable high-bandwidth pipes to many small
organizations. As is the case for the enterprise world, prices are
an important issue here, because the providers will be very cautious
in investing in such a non-core business.
In the short
term, this sector is expected to take the same upgrade path as the
long-haul carriers, replacing simple fiber links with WDM links.
However, since much of the network complexity lies within the realm
of regional providers, they are expected to be the first to suffer
from inflating network management and maintenance burdens due to the
increasing quantities of SDH equipment required to connect all these
channels. Thus, in the long run regional providers will replace SDH-based
networks with wavelength routing networks.
A different
market which falls under this category is that of providing
high-speed access to the home or SOHO. For such systems optical
access networks (PONs, SuperPONs) provide an economical solution,
which can integrate very well with wavelength routing networks.
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