Agilent enhances OmniBER OTN with jitter accuracy maps and NG SONET capabilities
October 27, 2004 Palo Alto, CA -- Agilent Technologies Inc. has unveiled what it claims is the first test solution to provide accurate and repeatable jitter with ITU-T O.172 jitter accuracy maps and advanced next-generation SONET/SDH capability within a single instrument. According to the company, the enhancements to the Agilent OmniBER optical transport network (OTN) family of communications performance analyzers reduce the cost of ownership for chipset designers, network equipment manufacturers (NEM), and service providers by integrating NG SONET and jitter into one instrument.
The Agilent OmniBER OTN now supports interface rates up to 2.5 Gbits/sec and 10 Gbits/sec. It is the only test instrument to combine generic framing procedure (GFP), virtual concatenation (VCat), Ethernet payload, and link capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS) measurement capabilities with the most accurate and repeatable jitter, plus O.172 jitter accuracy maps for measuring 10-Gbit/sec SONET/SDH and G.709 OTN jitter.
"Manufacturers have been pushing the limits to reduce the size and cost of pluggable optics, such as XFP and SFP, and an unintended consequence is potential increased jitter," explains David Taylor, chairman of Agilent's ITU-T O.172 Jitter Study Group. "Jitter leads to data errors, which can cost money in wasted bandwidth due to re-transmission and lost data. In addition to jitter measurement, our customers require NG SONET capabilities to support data transport across core and metro SONET/SDH networks and with Ethernet payloads, in particular. Agilent's new integrated OmniBER OTN with NG SONET and jitter lowers capital equipment costs and provides faster insight into NG SONET design conformance, aiding multi-vendor interoperability for network manufacturers."
The OmniBER OTN is the first instrument to include both accurate and repeatable jitter with International Telecommunications Union (ITU) accuracy maps, say company representatives. Agilent's OmniBER OTN provides ITU O.172 Appendix VII-based accuracy maps as standard on jitter products, plus a receiver-only fixed accuracy error of less than 15 mUI at 10 Gbits/sec. This gives much greater assurance of conformance to the 100-mUI industry standard.
The ITU is working with leading NEMs and test equipment manufacturers to ratify a procedure within ITU O.172 called the "Method for Verification of Measurement Result Accuracy," commonly referred to as Appendix VII. This procedure provides a jitter accuracy map for receiver-only jitter performance calibration and specification.
The Agilent OmniBER OTN is a second-generation NG SONET/SDH and jitter analyzer, scalable to 40 Gbits/sec, and is designed to have extremely low intrinsic jitter, a key enabler of greater measurement accuracy. The Agilent OmniBER OTN provides both functional and jitter conformance testing in a single product.
The Agilent J7233A and J7231B OmniBER OTN are available now at prices starting from $86,198. The J7233A OmniBER OTN is available up to 2.5 Gbits/sec with NG SONET/SDH plus jitter, and the J7231B OmniBER OTN is available up to 10 Gbits/sec with NG SONET/SDH plus jitter.