Altamar Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ditech Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: DITC), announced its new Titanium Optical Network System, an integrated, scalable transport system for the long-distance optical network. Altamar claims that Titanium offers carriers the industry's highest switching scalability, point-and-click provisioning, and integrated management and monitoring tools. With Titanium's scalable architecture, long-distance carriers will be able to deploy a system initially with a small switching capacity meeting their current needs, and subsequently add capacity in a linear, pay-as-you-grow fashion without the need to replace obsolete equipment. First production release of Titanium in Q1 2002 will be a system capable of scaling to 2 million OC-48 ports with an initial software release supporting 16,384 ports.
"With the rising demand for bandwidth and the tremendous growth of DWDM systems, RHK predicts the North American optical networking equipment market, which includes optical core switches, will grow from $20.6 billion last year to $45.1 billion in 2004," said Dana Cooperson, Director of Optical Transport with telecom market research firm RHK, Inc. "Based on this trend, service providers are going to want to put their money toward highly scalable systems that incorporate functionality from legacy systems, that let them transport the bandwidth tidal wave efficiently, and that let them manage wavelengths effectively."
Titanium provides the core switching and transport functionality to route and transmit the thousands of wavelengths of light in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks. While DWDM has solved the problem of expanding bandwidth between central offices in the long-distance network, it fails to address the issues of switching capacity, service velocity (the need to turn up optical circuits quickly), scarce floor space and power, and robust network protection. Employing an architectural approach that is optimized to solve these critical problems, Titanium is designed to integrate the key optical networking functionality of switching, transport, network management, and network protection into a single high-density, ultra-scalable system. Because of its integrated design and its use of optical and electrical components, Titanium will be able to be deployed initially with a small switching capacity and scaled as necessary, vastly exceeding the highest capacity optical switches currently available.
Although the legacy SONET optical transport network provides network protection by reserving 50 percent of the bandwidth for a redundant connection, when Titanium establishes an optical connection, Titanium's Virtual Rings technology will automatically calculate a backup connection. If the primary connection fails, the traffic will be re-routed to the backup connection within 50 milliseconds, identical to a SONET protection scheme. In contrast to the bandwidth inefficiency of SONET, Titanium's mesh architecture will allow service providers to minimize the amount of bandwidth reserved for network protection and thereby make a larger percentage of the overall network capacity available for revenue-generating traffic.
A demonstration of Titanium's capabilities will be shown at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) tradeshow in Anaheim, California from March 19-22 at Island 1470. Production shipment of Titanium is scheduled for calendar Q1 2002. Pricing is dependent on a number of network deployment options and will be disclosed to customers upon review of their network requirements.
About Altamar Networks:
Altamar Networks designs, develops and markets optical communications equipment for the long-distance optical network. For more information, visit www.altamar.com.