Startups from 2001 that had promised to work that multiservice edge, though, were absent. Appian Communications Inc. folded in January after new funding from France Telecom failed to come through. Almost simultaneously, Coriolis Networks Inc. ran out of money and closed its doors, despite having garnered Asian carriers' interest in its optical packet access systems. Lantern Communications Inc. was acquired by C-Cor.Net Corp. (State College, Pa.) in April, leaving Luminous Networks Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) and Corrigent Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) as the only 2000-01 startups left in the RPR Alliance.
Meanwhile, many vendors are still reinventing Sonet. Turin Networks Inc. (Petaluma, Calif.) used Supercomm to launch TraverseEdge, an expansion of its Traverse central-office Sonet box designed to bring in Ethernet traffic. Ciena Corp. (Linthicum, Md.) has added data-aware Sonet features such as GFP and LCAS to its popular CoreDirector digital switching system.
Even as Sonet gets more data-friendly, edge routers are ratcheting up in complexity. Vendors noted as core router players, including Juniper and Caspian, now are combining fixed IP functionality with more complex service multiplexing to play at the edge of the public network. Alcatel recently made a bid for the edge, launching the packet-prioritization architecture acquired last summer from TiMetra Networks Inc. Nortel went the furthest philosophically, however, combining the open GateD software from NextHop with fault-tolerant features to produce the Multiprovider Edge family-not a router at all, Nortel insisted, but a form of route-enabled aggregator.
Are vendors setting themselves up for another fall? Mangrove CEO Jonathan Reeves said two factors have changed since systems from failed edge OEMs like Appian and Coriolis were launched. "We can't underestimate the impact of new data-encapsulation features to increase the utility of Sonet, such as GFP, LCAS and virtual concatenation," said Reeves, who founded and sold optical/ATM companies Sahara Networks Inc. and Sirocco Systems Inc. in the late 1990s. "The standardization and wide availability of these features make all the difference in the world in bringing together Sonet, Ethernet and MPLS."
The other issue, he said, is timing. "With a few very limited exceptions in Asia, service providers just weren't spending money between 2000 and 2003, and some companies with very good architectures just ran out of time. We'll never see the huge boom in carrier spending we saw in the late 1990s, but at least local and regional service providers are purchasing equipment again," said Reeves.
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