Five Reasons to Adopt Layer 2 Ethernet Switching Over DWDM Networks Now

A new network is emerging for delivering media-rich and bandwidth-hungry content, applications and services. Traditional SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork)/SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) architectures, developed for the narrowband world of a generation ago, are overloaded. Such practices as stacking SONET/SDH rings to increase capacity are complex and costly, while Ethernet-over-SONET/SDH protocol conversions waste tremendous bandwidth. With data traffic exploding and now dwarfing the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM)-based demands, a move to pure packet-based transport over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) has significant economic benefit by avoiding packet to TDM conversions at each node. In addition, newer protocols such as Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), 10GigE and Fibre Channel are coming forward alongside advances in smart DWDM technology.