Today, traditional carriers keep adding equipment piecemeal or entire overlays to legacy networks that were originally designed for circuit-switched voice traffic to satisfy their enterprise customers' demands for megabit Internet access. So while bandwidth is a commodity, it's one that is difficult to provision and expensive to support in legacy networks. Treating bandwidth like the commodity it is, rather than a pricey, nonrenewable resource, means starting from scratch and designing the network specifically for packet-switched data. All Data, All Optical Voice solutions have been perfected over the last century, but their architectures have never been optimized for data. Even a new, converged voice and data infrastructure requires all sorts of equipment and connections to support voice and other circuit-switched services.
More equipment means more capital, more real estate, and more ongoing expense.
Optical networking delivers fatter pipes at a lower cost. The next generation of IP-optimized architectures will depend on and exploit Layer 3 protected IP over DWDM solutions both at the metro and backbone levels. Currently, DWDM systems are prominent in long-haul networks where capacity demands are at their highest. DWDM increases the capacity of a fiber-optic network by multiplexing 16 or more wavelengths of light over a single fiber. While DWDM offers unprecedented capacity, a new class of routers enables a streamlined, cost-effective network.