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| 10.3 |  | Examining Fiber Optic Transports |
| 10.3.6 |  | Implementing DWDM over a MAN |

The two largest problems facing service providers today in the metro environment are bandwidth scalability and fiber exhaustion.

DWDM addresses these needs through the use of wavelength multiplexing. Wavelength multiplexing allows a service provider to offer virtual dark fiber to customers, offering individual wavelengths or lambdas as individual dark fibers. One fiber ring supports 16 individual lambdas. In addition, each lambda can support up to OC-48 speeds, allowing for unprecedented scalability and growth for the future.

Through the use of virtual fiber by DWDM, an existing fiber infrastructure can be segmented to allow multiple service offerings. This allows for flexible network topology offerings to the client and lower infrastructure costs to the service provider.

One fiber infrastructure can support a variety of service offerings and topologies, such as:

- Dedicated point-to-point Ethernet
- Shared point-to-multipoint Ethernet
- Fully meshed gigabit Ethernet backbones
- Virtual local-area network(VLAN) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) support for QoS offerings