On 3/Aug/19 03:14, Brandon Martin wrote:
How are they handling optical power balancing across amplifiers and such? Do they just trust the customer to provide light at the power levels agreed upon? Bulk attenuate the entire "spectrum" automatically? Monitor and drop the whole lot if something is out of whack and causing saturation or gain balance problems for others?
Or is this something you're only seeing at metro distances where separate amplifiers are superfluous?
The details about this are very vendor-specific, and each vendor has some way in which they implement this. Spectrum would be a very customized product between the vendor and operator, and also between the operator and customer. So no BCP for this, as of yet, that I know of.
I've inquired with a few metro operators in my area about something like this, albeit a few years ago, and I got a pretty hard "no way we'd ever do that" out of them presumably for the reasons above.
We are seeing requests from as low as 600km, up to 1,600km, all the way to 7,000km. Mark.