Versatile bandwidth management: The design, development, and deployment of LambdaUnite®

The LambdaUnite® Multiservice Switch (MSS) has held the number one market position in the optical cross-connect (OXC) market segment for years now. It is a global product, applicable for the SONET and SDH market, and it is deployed all over the world. Concept development started in 1999 with a cross-functional team comprised of systems architecture and business management subject matter experts. The key successes of the product are the system architecture, the density, the feature richness, and the cost structure. The system architecture in particular has allowed the product to evolve from a broadband cross-connect to a system that today provides additional wideband cross-connect capacity, optical transport network (OTN) switching capability, automatically switched optical network with mesh restoration capability (ASON), and Ethernet transport and switching. The system can host interface types from 45 Mbps (DS-3) up to 40 Gbps (OC-768), all of them in universal slots. Although the initial product started with best-in-class density, the density and system capacity can still be easily doubled. In other words, the system architecture has been transformed into a platform.