Such was the mood at the National Fiber-Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) here this past week, as vendors struggled for footing in an environment where carrier spending has flattened and vendor flameouts are likely to continue.

Yet, amid the gloom, some new technologies offer hope. The advent of generic framing procedure (GFP) and related standards promise the ability to merge the worlds of Ethernet and Sonet more efficiently. And even 40-Gbit/second optical transport was being discussed optimistically by some attendees, although the topic drew scorn from others.

Both technologies are trying to cash in on the kind of desperation spending that carriers continue to do. Capital expenditures in telecom remain a multibillion dollar business even in a down year, but carriers are eschewing new technology, choosing instead to spend in areas where concrete demand has surfaced or where operational expenses are too blatantly out of control.

It's a matter of providing "less-than-minor updates" to existing network infrastructure, while giving carriers more efficient ways to use bandwidth, said Padgett, Nortel Network's director of marketing for optical networks.

Those ideas play into the hands of GFP, a frame format that lets existing Sonet networks transport any type of traffic. GFP is drawing particular interest in the Ethernet realm, thanks to two other emerging standards: virtual concatenation, which allows finer granularity of Sonet streams; and the link capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS), which would allow dynamic changes to Sonet tributary sizes. Combined, the three standards address the fact that Ethernet multiple-of-10 speeds don't fit cleanly into Sonet, which juggles traffic in STS-1 (51-Mbit/s) increments.

As a result, Ethernet-over-Sonet was a hot topic at Supercomm in June, and vendors at NFOEC likewise pledged support for GFP, LCAS and virtual concatenation. It helps their cause that edge services such as virtual private networks are based on Ethernet and generate the kind of traffic that these standards address. "Those kinds of features are what plug into virtual concatenation and GFP," said Greg Borodaty, vice president at the network products division of Vitesse Semiconductor Corp.

But these ideas have floated around the industry for quite some time, and vendors including Nortel Networks and Coriolis Networks Inc., already have pre-standard versions of GFP on the market, having produced systems before GFP silicon was available. "The reality is, there's no availability until the end of the year," said Greg Wortman, vice president of marketing at Coriolis (Boxborough, Mass.).

A similar flexibility can be found in the resilient packet ring (RPR) standard, which proponents said would make an ideal complement to the Ethernet-over-Sonet standards. "We think [RPR] ties in very neatly with GFP," Padgett said.

For now, however, Nortel is keeping the two separate. The company is concentrating on getting GFP rolling in its Optera Connect DX switch, targeting the network edge, while RPR has been a focus for Nortel's metropolitan-network systems.

Crawling to 40 Gig

Meanwhile, the march toward OC-768 (40-Gbit/s) networks continued at NFOEC. Large-scale deployment of OC-768 in the long haul is unlikely any time soon, but speakers noted that certain overcrowded links will be candidates for the first OC-768 implementations, possibly as early as 2003.

"There's some traction for 40 Gbit/s long haul, and that will lead to some real deployment next year," said Carsten Videcrantz, director of product marketing at Mintera Corp.

But Padgett argued that metropolitan OC-768 is a stronger possibility than long-haul OC-768, as some carriers are deploying OC-192 (10-Gbit/s) pipes that will need to be aggregated.

In any event, it appears test equipment for OC-768 will be ready, as Agilent Technologies Inc. and Spirent Communications showed off new bit-error-rate testers with optical interfaces. For Spirent, the addition of optical interfaces to the OTA-4400 was a first. Agilent had announced an optical bit-error-rate tester for OC-768 last year, but the box was "the size of a refrigerator," said Larry Desjardin, high-bandwidth program manager for Agilent (Santa Rosa, Calif.).