Hi Etienne In short, the idea is that optical networks are wasteful and routers do a better job making more use of a network's capacity than ROADMs. Take the extra router hop (or 3 or 8) versus short-cutting it with an optical network because the silicon is so low-latency anyway that it hardly makes a difference now. Putting more GBs per second on fewer strands means saving a lot of money on infrastructure costs.
400G ZR comes to mind as a foundational technology since it basically made active optical muxponder equipment obsolete in the metro. The savings here means telcos/enterprises can afford more router ports, which we've already established can utilize paths more efficiently anyway. Otherwise, this is more of a concept and can be executed with a variety of pre-existing technologies, or someone's new secret sauce that bakes everything together like SD-WAN did to its constituent technologies. -Matt On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 12:30 PM Etienne-Victor Depasquale via NANOG < nanog@nanog.org> wrote: > Hello folks, > > Simple question: does "routed optical networks" have a clear meaning in > the metro area context, or not? > > Put differently: does it call to mind a well-defined stack of technologies > in the control and data planes of metro-area networks? > > I'm asking because I'm having some thoughts about the clarity of this > term, in the process of carrying out a qualitative survey of the results of > the metro-area networks survey. > > Cheers, > > Etienne > > -- > Ing. Etienne-Victor Depasquale > Assistant Lecturer > Department of Communications & Computer Engineering > Faculty of Information & Communication Technology > University of Malta > Web. https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/etiennedepasquale > -- Matt Erculiani ERCUL-ARIN