Customers seem not to care. Mesh is ready for prime time, but most service providers probably aren' t, says Nicoll. That's a lot to bite off. Evolving a ring network to a mesh requires a complete change of mindset, and many carriers haven't yet reached the comfort level required to alter the fundamentals of their network architecture. Meshes are also difficult to manage and may be prone to outages from software glitches.
Rings have the clear benefit of simplicity, which lets carriers sleep at night.
For this reason, look for greenfield carriers to go mesh first. Interoperability is also a concern, though Storm plays this down somewhat. Running management in software means you can tweak the system to accommodate other vendors. But for now, Storm is only using Sycamore gear for optical intelligence. Entire network topologies cannot be upgraded overnight, says Wang.