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January 2001 Issue

Pulse: Wave7 Optics Takes ‘Off-the-Shelf’ Approach

With $9 million in recent financing, Atlanta, Ga-based start-up Wave7 Optics is anxious to implement its plan to use "off-the-shelf technologies" to provide fiber to homes and businesses. CT recently talked with three of Wave7 Optics top executives: Jim Farmer, chief technical officer; Emmanuel Vella, chief marketing officer and John Kenny, chief scientist. All three joined the start-up from ANTEC.

What makes fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) more doable today than a year or two ago?

Farmer: Part of it is demand-based. We are seeing a rapid price decline of certain key components, such as digital fiber optic transceivers. That’s driven partly by demand for SONET (synchronous optical network) and Gigabit Ethernet applications like this. We’re also seeing much more interest on the operating side in putting in fiber much deeper.

What are you offering?

Farmer: We have a unique architecture. It’s not a passive optical network (PON) architecture, because PON architectures, by the time you get them installed, still look too expensive to us. By strategically placing an active device in the field, we can have the best of both worlds. It’s not a node in the conventional sense of the word. This one is fiber-in, fiber-out, instead of fiber-in, radio frequency (RF) out. But for the same reason that the cable industry uses a node, we’re using a something we call a core.

A core? Is it part erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)?

There’s an EDFA involved in part of it, but there’s more to it than that. There’s some smarts and some signal processing that goes on. Don’t try to think of it as equivalent to a node in terms of what’s in it, only in terms of functionality. We’re bringing signals in bulk optically out to a place in the field, and then we’re changing them around some for more economical distribution the final mile.

So is your core a box?

Vella: We’re actually building a transport system.

Farmer: It’s a series of boxes. We don’t expect to operate the systems, but we expect to supply equipment more along the model of an ANTEC, or a Scientific-Atlanta or a GI (Motorola).

What can you do differently?

Kenny: What we’ve done is used existing or virtually off-the-shelf, both passive and active optical technologies. It’s really the way in which we put things together that gives us unique capabilities and keeps our fiber counts low for the operators. And since the technologies exist, we can get to market quickly. I don’t know of anyone else who’s come up with a scheme similar to this.

Does it use dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)?

Farmer: No, it does not. It could be imposed on top of it, but our system does not depend on DWDM.

Vella: That makes us very compelling. John has come up with some approaches on the optical side that obviate the requirement for DWDM. Although you’ve seen a precipitous drop in terms of DWDM prices, take DWDM topology down to the home and start trying to amortize the cost of DWDM...

Farmer: Even the power requirements for DWDM are prohibitive. We’ve even looked at coarse WDM, and the cost of multiplexers is quite significant, several hundred dollars per port, on each end.

And that’s the cheaper of WDM varieties?

Kenny: Yes. We just looked at hopefully every possible technology, and went through a costing exercise and honed in on what we believe is the lowest cost solution for this.

Is single mode fiber sufficient for your purposes?

Vella: Yes. That’s another real strength that we have. We’re not having to use anything innovative, like (Lucent’s) AllWave fiber. We’ll run on standard single mode that’s deployed all over the universe.

Farmer: We have a unique way of putting things together. And we have some unique ways of handling signals at certain portions. But as far as components go, we’re building with off-the-shelf components. That’s very important both from a time-to-market perspective and from a risk and costs standpoint. If you’re on the leading edge of components, you’re probably going to the expensive and late.

Vella: That’s why they call it the bleeding edge.

What your timetable?

Vella: We’re looking at being able to lab-trial our technology with customers towards the third quarter of next year, and then start looking at beta rollouts, end of next year and then early 2002.

What’s the story with your name?

Vella: In nautical terminology, the seventh wave is always the largest wave.

Is the seventh wave the Napster wave?

Vella: The seventh wave is going to be the big wave in terms of demand for convergence.

You’re up to about 30 people now?

Farmer: Recruiting’s gone better than I expected. Part of it is our compelling story and part of it is that a lot of people do want to be part of a start-up. And we honestly got lucky. ADC was shutting down its Atlanta design center, so we said, ‘Hey, guys, come on over here.’

What’s your team look like?

Vella: A very solid engineering team made up of a mix of hardware and software engineering. Our architecture is very software intensive, a lot of embedded software capability, because we’ve come up with a unique approach to bandwidth allocation at the home. We’re giving each home a very large dedicated pool of bandwidth, and we’re dynamically provisioning additional bandwidth out of a pool on a demand-per-subscriber basis.

So you’ve got smarts at the home?

Vella: There are some smarts at the home. There’s a lot of smarts at the core device for the allocation of bandwidth across a small cluster of homes.

How small?

Vella: We’re down to the very low end of the Richter scale in terms of our number of homes of served. And that’s to keep your family group small and to provision the system a little more dynamically than we’re used to in a hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network.

And how much bandwidth?

Vella: I don’t want to call out exactly how much we’re offering at the home right now. That’s a closely guarded secret.

Farmer: It’s a lot.

Vella: It’s really a lot.

 Back to January 2001 Issue

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