April 7, 2004 Fremont, CA--The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today plans for the industry's first global joint carrier, multi-vendor optical network interoperability demonstration. This first of a kind demonstration will be conducted simultaneously in China, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States and will be showcased for the public in June 2004 at SuperComm in Chicago. The OIF world interoperability demonstration will be hosted by some of the world's leading telecommunications carriers including AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI R&D Laboratories, NTT, Telecom Italia, and Verizon.
"The leading role of global Tier 1 service providers in the OIF's SuperComm demo testifies to these firms' desire to make standards-based intelligent optical internetworking a reality and to build the foundation for the truly global data services that their international customers want," said Dana Cooperson, group director of RHK's optical network research services. "This event will showcase optical network interoperability and industry cooperation at a higher level than past industry demos where the emphasis has been on vendor and products."
Along with the carriers, a number of OIF member supplier companies will also be participating in the world interoperability demonstration. The participating supplier and carrier companies will conduct interoperability testing of Ethernet over SONET/SDH services and dynamic optical networking services. Based on ITU-T standards for Ethernet service adaptation, the Ethernet over SONET/SDH services testing will include the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), and the Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS). The dynamic optical networking interoperability testing will be based on OIF implementation agreements for UNI 1.0 release 2 and E-NNI, and will include testing of both the control and data plane. These implementation agreements are based on the ITU's requirements for automatically switched optical networks. The carriers will also be coordinating the overall network interoperability requirements between the multiple carrier lab locations.
The world interoperability demonstration will be available for public observation during SuperComm 2004 from June 22-24, in Chicago at the OIF booth #2006, Hall B2. SuperComm attendees will be able to view live demonstrations of OIF's latest implementation agreements on UNI 1.0 and E-NNI as supported by carrier and supplier participants.
"This worldwide demonstration is a significant step for the OIF and the industry," said Joe Berthold, CIENA, president of the OIF. "Conducting a live test among so many locations simultaneously has never been done before. We are grateful for the broad carrier support for the interoperability testing work of the OIF."
Launched in April of 1998, the OIF is a non-profit organization with more than 170+ international member companies, including many of the world's leading carriers and vendors. As the only industry group uniting representatives from data and optical networks, the OIF helps advance the standards and methods of optical networks. OIF's purpose is to accelerate the deployment of interoperable, cost-effective and robust optical internetworks and their associated technologies. Optical internetworks are data networks composed of routers and data switches interconnected by optical networking elements.
With the goal of promoting worldwide compatibility of optical internetworking products, the OIF actively supports and extends the work of national and international standards bodies. Formal liaisons have been established with The ATM Forum, IEEE 802.3 HSSG, IETF, ITU-T Study Group 13, ITU-T Study Group 15, MEF, NPF, T1M1, T1X1, TMF and the XFP MSA Group.