Early Rumbelings in the Fiber-Optic World

 
Of the 12, fiber network, cutting edge tech companies, I have been following since last October the losses are astounding. After a bit of investor interest last fall they have all lost 25-50% or more in value. The first sign of life comes from Juniper Networks, a Sunnyvale, California company. Quarterly earnings surprised the market at 8 cents over annalists estimates of 5 cents. More significant seems the deployment of their IP/MPLS (Multi Point LAN Service) system, which connects multiple city’s virtual private networks seamlessly. The software auto-discovers other platforms in each VPN, and auto-provisions MPLS connectivity to those platforms.
 
Such automatic configuration must be a big deal. I think it is the stumbling block that prevents phone companies from deploying much of anything on their fiber optic lines. Seattle Wireless, a small group of technology buffs, deployed a wide area network across Seattle rooftops. When I visited them two years ago they were working on this difficult programming to facilitate the addition of new members. They described the difficulty inherent in such programming of multiple sites.
 
“Juniper Networks M-series Multiservice Routing Platform is a foundation for Time Warner Telecom's new extended metro Ethernet services, including Multi-point Extended Native LAN, which is the largest Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) deployment in the U.S.”
 
Time Warner Telecom has extended this technology to 44 cities. Jubiter Network’s Gigabit Ethernet IQ PICs provide quality voice, video and critical digital traffic over their network.