Bill,
WDM may lower the price per Mbit/s considerably, however many of these
Mbit/s will have to be sold to be profitable as a service. Connecting
two routers using dedicated WDM gear and 5km of fiber to send over
155Mbit/s traffic is more expensive then connecting the two routers
directly using 5km of fiber, even though the first solution would
give you much more available capacity.
If multiple services need to run over the same fiber then existing
ATM or SDH networks are well capable of multiplexing these services
over one fiber at often lower costs then installing new WDM gear.
There where there is a fiber shortage because there is no further
room for service multiplexing or there is a shortage of capacity, WDM
will be a very good solution. It is much cheaper then installing new
fiber.
WDM is therefor very real for connecting TEX's together and for
connecting LEX's to TEX's. I expect that WDM needs OADMs or other
up and coming technology for SDH or WDM to become cost-effective for
the MAN/local loop.
To return to the original topic, for the forseeable future (3-5 years?)
bandwidth will remain scarce and therefor expensive. The prices per
MBit/s will drop shortply but this will be compensated in a large
increase in demand. An distance-based pricing scheme could therefor
be an appropriate solution. Personally, I don't think it will happen.
-- Steven
PS: if anyone can prove me wrong with some numbers, please show me 
I've been working on cost calculations for bandwidth for the last
couple of weeks.
In your mail from 29-5-1998 you write:
Steven:
New municipal and campus WDM gear from Cambrian, Ciena and Nortel makes it
a lot easier and cheaper to deliver data services over separate WDM channels
than to MUX them into one SONET or ATM service. More importantly becuase
the service is data transparent, each customer can manage their own WDM
channel independent of the other channels. Try doing that with SONET or
ATM!!
Check out www.cambrian.com for more details.
However, I agree with you that if you have spare fiber it is cheaper just to
light up the fiber without WDM or SONET. Packet Engines claims they can
drive 22km of dark fiber with no additional equipment or repeaters
Bill
Steven:
New municipal and campus WDM gear from Cambrian, Ciena and Nortel makes it
a lot easier and cheaper to deliver data services over separate WDM channels
than to MUX them into one SONET or ATM service. More importantly becuase
the service is data transparent, each customer can manage their own WDM
channel independent of the other channels. Try doing that with SONET or
ATM!!
Check out www.cambrian.com for more details.
However, I agree with you that if you have spare fiber it is cheaper just to
light up the fiber without WDM or SONET. Packet Engines claims they can
drive 22km of dark fiber with no additional equipment or repeaters
Actually, the word is "demonstrates", not "claims".
At Networld+Interop we had a 12,000 ft spool of fiber with 6 pairs of
fiber. The 6 12,000 ft lengths were patches to provide a total of 72,000
ft of fiber and portions of our booth were run through that entire length.
Not only that, but the 5 connections between the 6 lengths were done with
normal patch cables and SC connectors (which are more lossy than a fusion
splice).
I work for Packet Engines as SQA manager and that spool is now in our demo
area about 50 ft. away and we're still running voice, video and data
through it for our demo's.
Bill
-------------------------------------------
Bill St Arnaud
Director Network Projects
CANARIE
bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca
http://www.canarie.ca/bstarn
davids@packetengines.com Packet Engines, Inc. (509)922-9190
http://www.packetengines.com/ Spokane, WA (509)922-9185 (fax)