Who says science fiction and business don't mix?

Jedai plans to use the force of fiber optics to help cable operators travel into what for them is an uncharted region of the telecom universe: small and medium-sized businesses.

By Mitch Shapiro and Don Gall

Historically, small businesses have been an especially tough financial nut to crack because they want the reliability and speed of fiber optics but often cannot put a business case together to justify the cost of a private network. As a result, much of this market segment has remained out of cable's reach and in generally underserved. From a galaxy not so far away (Red Bank, NJ) comes Jedai Broadband Networks. Jedai's goal is to help cable operators bridge this gap by deploying its newly developed suite of Intelligent IP Optical Access networking products.

A large percentage of today's local cable networks deliver fiber optics well within the last mile of their customers. In many cases, leading multiservice operators (MSOs) such as Time Warner Cable (now part of AOL-Time Warner) have deployed as many as six individual fibers in a virtual star architecture to serve an average of 500 homes passed per node. As these hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks were built, fiber was often extended to or near business parks that had been largely ignored in the days of coaxial tree and branch cable networks.

The next logical step in this network and business evolution was to develop business plans and network architectures designed to leverage this optical toehold in the business market. To varying degrees, leading cable operators have begun taking that step, with generally encouraging but still limited results. Their desire to take their small- and medium-sized business (SMB) initiatives to the next level of market penetration and performance is where Jedai and its suite of products come into play.

According to company documents, Jedai "has worked closely with its MSO partners through all stages of development and have specifically designed its products to enable these operators to effectively and economically deploy optical-based services to business customers." This means designing products consistent with MSO business models and that can be unobtrusively and cost-effectively overlaid on operators' HFC networks.

According to Tony Pierson, vice president of marketing and product development, a fundamental goal of Jedai's product development has been to help operators enter the SMB market with a success-based capital structure that supports their target return on investment (ROI), while providing maximum flexibility to support cost-effective market penetration and an array of applications, including ultra-high-speed Internet voice over IP, virtual LANs (VLANs), virtual private networks (VPNs), transparent LAN services, and video streaming.

This general goal drove some key cost-related design goals:
· Keeping equipment costs down while providing maximum flexibility in terms of expansion and support for a range of services and protocols.
· Designing equipment and architectures that minimize the construction costs needed to extend fiber to individual businesses.

By cutting the cost of electronics, says Pierson, Jedai helps operators lower the total capital cost of reaching each customer. That increases the percentage of businesses near existing customers that can be cost-effectively served with Jedai's electronics. That, in turn, shortens the average length of fiber runs required to reach this expanded range of nearby potential customers. The result, says Pierson, is a virtuous cycle of per-customer cost reduction and market penetration ideally suited to SMB market entry by cable operators seeking to balance the goals of strong market penetration with solid and steadily improving ROI.

Jedai uses a combination of coarse WDM and DWDM to couple into the existing networks with minimal impact on current deployment. Its equipment has been designed to operate in the L-band, which runs from 1569.59 to 1604.03 nm. This part of the ITU grid is typically not used by cable operators. Jedai equipment supports a range of services and protocols demanded in the marketplace, including 10/100Base-T, Gigabit Ethernet, DS-1, VPN, VLAN, and TLS.

Following is a list of Jedai's current products and a short description of their function in the network.
· IP WaveFront architecture enables the network to scale and sell value-added data and telephony services by adding IP intelligence at the customer premises. Key components of this architecture are (1) SmartPacket, which enables intelligent edge routing, CES and clock propagation, easy provisioning, and management; (2) LightXpander, which optimizes the existing network by reusing fiber currently carrying other services (or dark fiber if available)--this technology allows the operator to add wavelengths to the network from the core to the customer; and (3) CommandRunner EMS, an SNMP-based element manager.
· FrontRunner Optical Network Terminal is a multiservice access platform that provides routing, switching, bandwidth control, quality of service, and traffic classification for multiple 10/100, Gigabit Ethernet, or T1 ports.
· PacketRunner Optical Network Unit is a Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides a traffic consolidation point that ties smaller pipes into the larger bandwidth segments of the network.
· WaveRunner Optical Access Gateway is a high-capacity, flexible DWDM platform that allows for a modular migration path to add 1 to 32 wavelengths on networks carrying existing traffic or up to 64 wavelengths on a dark fiber.
· BladeRunner is a multiservice, high-end, gigabit switch/router that would reside in the cable operator's headend or hub.SkyRunner Free Space Optics is a high-capacity optical wireless link that enables service providers to quickly connect valuable customers with bandwidth-intensive services. This service is used where establishing a physical link would be impractical. It has a line-of-sight range of 500 to 2,000 m and full-duplex bandwidths from 622 Mbits/sec to 10 Gbits/sec. It uses 1,500-nm lasers and is auto-tracking and weather-adaptive.

Jedai's business case relies on using the cable operators' HFC plant to get to the last mile. Utilizing either unused wavelengths and/or unused fibers, it extends the fiber network from the node to each business customer with either a protected ring or point-to-point architecture. Circuits can be made at 1310-nm, 1550-nm CWDM, 1550-nm ITU DWDM, or free-space lasers. The range of products is designed to start simple to allow success-based capital deployment. As customers are added, the strategy is to move from a single wavelength to as many as 64 by deploying additional equipment.

If a location needing service cannot be serviced by traditional fiber optics, the Sky Runner product can be used to bypass the obstacle. In our view, that is an appropriate use of free-space lasers in a distribution environment, in contrast to some plans we've seen that try to use free-space optics as a full replacement for wired networks. As a rule of thumb, attempts to force a technology into an application for which it is not well suited end up being more expensive to install and operate, i.e., A BAD IDEA!

The Front Runner product serves as the network interface to the customer premises. The entire product line can be configured for N-to-1 to 1 redundancy to allow carrier class protection. The Jedai solution boasts sub-50-msec DS-1 (traditional telephone) protection and sub-1-sec protection for data-based traffic. Additional bandwidth is added by consolidating data streams into higher data rates with PacketRunner and/or additional fibers and/or wavelengths with WaveRunner.

We devoted this column to a discussion of Jedai's strategy and product line because it is one of the first companies to offer a fiber-based SMB solution that takes advantage of today's HFC networks without drastically changing the existing architecture or adding significant complexity and includes all the components for a total end-to-end solution that can be tailored to local demand. Such platforms can serve as key market accelerators as cable operators scale up their business plans, capital budgets, and staffing aimed at the underserved SMB market.