WAVELENGTHS SPREAD APART, VENDORS PACKED TOGETHER

摘要

Rough times call for rough technologies. As such, coarse wave-length division multiplexing seemed a perfect fit for the bumpy ride of the current telecom slump. As a cheaper, shorter-range version of dense WDM, it gave carriers a less expensive way to turn up new sites and new customers. Andbecause it contains cheaper, less precise componentry, it provided a low-end product for metro DWDM vendors to turn to as sales for their high-end gear thinned out. "They're really fairly dumb devices," said Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer. Cogent has been using CWDM for more than a year now, and CWDM gear from Cisco Systems has come to comprise more than 80% of its deployments. CWDM can typically undercut the price of deploying DWDM by about 30% to 40%. But because Cogent's network architecture had been using DWDM gear somewhat inefficiently in its edge networks, the switch to CWDM cut Shaeffer's costs by 80%.