Third Generation Optical Network Management as a Market Differentiator

by Lawrence Gasman
President
Communications Industry Researchers, Inc. (ldg@cir-inc.com)

Research carried out by Communications Industry Researchers (CIR) for its recently published report, MANAGING THE ALL OPTICAL NETWORK, indicates that service providers’ network management concerns for optical networks now extend well beyond the traditional focus of provisioning. (See Exhibit below.) As a result, we believe that the optical networking industry is about to take a major step forward in the management of optical networks that will enable new management functionality for the service provider, while at the same time providing more opportunity for vendors of optical networking systems to distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

First generation optical networks were point-to-point arrangements that needed little that could be called network management. Second generation systems offered the ability to provision high data rate services over the ability to generate raw bandwidth. The earliest supporters of these second generation systems distinguished themselves in the marketplace by offering relatively sophisticated provisioning management systems, but soon the rest of the world began to catch up. And while automated optical networking provisioning proved a good selling feature to service providers burdened with manual provisioning for years, the revenue enhancement from bandwidth-on-demand services that automated optical provisioning promised proved slow in coming.

According to our research, the hallmark of the emerging third generation of optical networking platforms will be a slew of new network management functions that holds out the possibility of some new business opportunities for service providers and market differentiators for vendors of such platforms.

CIR’s research indicates that third-generation optical network management will need to emphasize end-to-end performance monitoring and management. We believe that this will become increasingly important to service providers in order to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) to their customers and to help ensure that they comply with the service agreements. Optical monitoring actually covers several parameters, including optical power, frequency and signal/noise ratio.

CIR believes that there are (at least) five drivers forcing vendors to incorporate better optical performance management into their next generation systems. These include:

• The fact that optical performance monitoring/management is becoming virtually mandatory to guarantee reliable service in networks with rapidly growing numbers of optical channels;
• That monitoring and performance management are increasingly required because the hurried deployment of optical networks can lead to lower quality installations;
• The current competitive environment in which expensive fat pipes that suffer network outages can lead to significant—and sometimes permanent—losses of revenue;
• The growing need for performance management to monitor SLAs and avoid penalties; and
• That optical monitoring and management can help reduce the loss of reputation resulting from network outages.

While these drivers emphasize the cost containment aspects of optical network monitoring, we believe that optical network monitoring may also have some impact on revenue generation for service providers. During our research, one service provider told us that the ability to measure issues such as quality of service, network uptime, bit error rates and data throughputs help it win customers.

In its research for MANAGING THE ALL OPTICAL NETWORK, CIR also noted a trend towards optical networking vendors offering network planning tools as part of their product suites. We believe that in the long run this will be an important feature of optical networking platforms, but we were a little surprised by the relative lack of current interest in this aspect of network management among the service providers we interviewed.

At the moment, smaller service providers do not need sophisticated planning tools, while the larger ones have already built their own. However, some of the largest service providers have told us that they are very open to purchasing optical network planning tools from optical networking platform vendors, if the tool possessed by the vendor is better equipped than its own.

Fault management, we believe, will also be a growing part of third generation optical network management. Features that various service providers have mentioned to CIR as being of importance include the ability to automatically detect and log faults, and the ability to maximize bandwidth utilization during recovery. Root cause analysis is also important to some service providers so that they may enable alarm locations without a reasonable doubt.

But while performance monitoring, planning tools and fault management will all play a much bigger role in the future of optical network management, we also believe that the current focus of optical network management, provisioning, will continue to be of prime importance, as was strongly indicated by our discussions with leading service providers. However, because the importance of service provisioning is already well established, vendors are unlikely to be successful in the market simply by touting their provisioning capabilities. Vendors instead must emphasize (and in some detail) the specific performance attributes of their provisioning systems. We also believe that vendors should not hype the revenue generating capabilities of their service provisioning platforms. For example, a service provider that had no potential customers for wavelength services and needed only modest upgrades of its capacity may still see SONET as the way to go.

For more information on this report please contact Robert Nolan at CIR (804) 984-0245 ext. 19 or e-mail robert.nolan@cir-inc.com

Communications Industry Researchers, Inc.
P.O. Box 5387 Charlottesville, VA 22905, USA
Phone (804) 984-0245 Fax (804) 984-0247 e-mail info@cir-inc.com