While the death of baseball great Ted Williams has thrust the subject of cryogenics into the news in recent weeks, long haul optical players appear to have latched onto the idea of suspended animation some time ago.

The strategy of multiple startups, such as Calient Networks and PhotonEx, appears to be staving off impending death by putting corporate spending and product development plans on ice, with the hope of thawing out currently unwanted switches and transport gear in conjunction with the next wave of carrier spending. Even established players, such as Nortel Networks, have drastically scaled back long haul operations. Others, such as Sycamore Networks, have gone as far as to pull the plug on transport products altogether.

The difficulty with these deep-freeze strategies, say analysts, is that it has become increasingly difficult to predict when service providers will begin to add optical capacity to their networks.

"While it's hard to know when the excess capacity will be absorbed, I think we could see some spending in the early part of next year." says Mark Lutkowitz, vice president of optical networking research at Communications Industry Researchers, "For every optimist, however, there lurks a pessimist."

"I don't think carriers are even seriously looking at products right now," says Andy McCormick, an analyst with Optical Strategies. "Everybody has put long-haul on hold."

While it's nearly impossible to find a consensus on when carrier spending will return, nearly everyone agrees with the notion that when service providers do release the death grips on their wallets, their buying habits will be on the conservative side.

"The pace with which carriers will build out their networks is unknown," says Peter Allen, president and CEO at Innovance Networks, a startup supplier of optical switching and transport gear for the network core. "That means they will find it preferable to take small steps that lead to a full solution, rather than building a whole network from day one."

Allen adds that the days of a service provider making a major overhaul to its infrastructure are long gone. Though he says carriers are more interested than ever in constructing a network that is both cost efficient and self-configuring, current financial conditions will force them to assemble this vision of network nirvana one route at a time.

Switching and transport Ironically, it seems that a route-by-route expansion model would throw cold water on the prospects of Innovance and other players, such as Altamar Networks and Ceyba Networks, all of whom offer systems that integrate the functionality of optical switches and transport gear. These companies say they can enable carriers to gain efficiencies in their backbones through integration and converting mostly static point-to-point DWDM links into a network that can be quickly provisioned to run new services and free up stranded bandwidth.

Representatives from all three companies, however, say that while integrating transport and switching to build an agile optical network is a major selling point, their products are designed to be deployed independently, allowing carriers to pursue a gradual migration path to an intelligent network.

Ceyba's strategy, according to Benoit Fleury, vice president of product management and marketing, is to lead with transport, augment that with optical add/drop gear, and then introduce its photonic switching system when carriers are ready to move from static connections to a switched environment. Fleury says carriers are already experiencing congestion along heavily-trafficked routes, especially along the East Coast.

As they fill up remaining capacity on legacy DWDM gear, carriers will begin to light up routes on new fibers, says Fleury. Ceyba's strategy is to land some of these route expansion contracts by delivering DWDM gear with the promise that carriers can eventually move in switches that will dramatically reduce transport costs by eliminating optical-to-electrical conversions in the network core.

Innovance is pushing a similar lead-with-transport strategy.

As carriers begin to expand their networks on a route-by-route bases, says Allen, they will eventually reach a point where it will make sense to eliminate the back-to-back electronics in DWDM gear by adding photonic switching gear.

"As they build out, they will find high degrees of pass-through traffic at nodal points and recognize that it makes sense to use photonic switching," says Allen. "If they use Innovance's line systems, they can add our switching to bring intelligence into the network."

Altamar is backing a similar strategy, with the exception that it is leading with its switching system, which is based on an electronic fabric and capable of doing sub-wavelength grooming. Marc Schwager, vice president of marketing at Altamar, says that carriers are more likely to build out their optical cores by introducing switching into static DWDM routes.

Which will come back first, switching or transport? That question will only be answered when carriers begin spending again. In the meantime, optical long haul players will just have to continue to chill.