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Re: The future of transport in the metro area


From: Brandon Martin <lists.nanog () monmotha net>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2019 21:14:02 -0400

On 8/2/19 4:10 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:
Now, the next step in all this that is starting to gain a bit of
traction is "spectrum", i.e., rather than take a normal grey service
from a Transport operator, have them deliver you a portion of the DWDM
spectrum so that you can run as much bandwidth as you want over their
network. Think of it as dark fibre, but lit...

How are they handling optical power balancing across amplifiers and such? Do they just trust the customer to provide light at the power levels agreed upon? Bulk attenuate the entire "spectrum" automatically? Monitor and drop the whole lot if something is out of whack and causing saturation or gain balance problems for others?

Or is this something you're only seeing at metro distances where separate amplifiers are superfluous? I've inquired with a few metro operators in my area about something like this, albeit a few years ago, and I got a pretty hard "no way we'd ever do that" out of them presumably for the reasons above.
--
Brandon Martin


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