AT&T Activates First Open ROADMs with Ciena and Fujitsu

AT&T recently activated a 100 Gbps wavelength in its production network in the Dallas area that uses Open ROADM-compliant technology. Specifically, AT&T connected 2 high capacity IP/MPLS routers with transponders and ROADMs provided by Ciena and Fujitsu.

Open ROADM project is a project underway with the backing of AT&T and a goal of driving faster innovation and open software control for the Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) used in optical transport networks. An Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) defines interoperability specifications for Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM). Included are the ROADM switch as well as transponders and pluggable optics. Specifications consist of both Optical interoperability as well as YANG data models.

In a blog posting, Andre Fuetsch, President of AT&T Labs and CTO, said the newly installed ROADMs support full software control according to the published Open ROADM specification. NetConf/YANG APIs are used for controlling and managing the optical network. The 100G wavelength was provisioned using an SDN ROADM Controller developed by Fujitsu and integrated into the AT&T ECOMP architecture.

http://about.att.com/innovationblog/open_roadms
http://openroadm.org/home.html