Last year, Global Industry Analysts put out a research note projecting that the worldwide reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) market would surpass $10.8 billion by 2020. The firm saw much of that growth coming from the need for data, video, and voice service providers to address the immense network traffic generated by the likes of social networks, data center virtualization, file sharing, video downloads, cloud computing, and online gaming.

Andre Fuetsch, president and CTO at AT&T Labs writes in a blog that the company is pursuing two goals with new ROADMs, which are software control and open hardware specs. Fuetsch also boasted about what he says is an industry-first, multi-vendor interoperability implementation. “We recently implemented in the Dallas area a 100 gigabit per second optical wavelength in our production network using Open ROADM-compliant technology,” he writes. “Specifically, we connected two high capacity IP/MPLS routers with transponders and ROADMs provided by Ciena and Fujitsu.”

AT&T reports that data traffic on its wireless network grew by a whopping 150,000 percent between 2007 and 2015, and Fuetsch calls ROADMs “one of the workhorses pulling that growing load.”

He further notes that controlling and managing the optical network is done via the NetConf/YANG APIs and information models defined in the Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement standards. “This is an industry-first demonstration of model-driven control and management of optical equipment. The 100G wavelength was provisioned using an SDN ROADM Controller developed by Fujitsu and integrated into the AT&T ECOMP architecture,” Fuetsch says.

More about the OpenROADM project is available here.