An interesting article regarding Akara and what it is doing in the 
marketplace.

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		 Subject: Telecom Technology: Fiber Optics: Storage and bandwidth services 
company launched


Storage and bandwidth services company launched 
By Heather Harreld InfoWorld.com 
  
12/11/2000 
InfoWorld Daily News 
(c) Copyright 2000 InfoWorld Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved. 
A new optical networking company with a product designed to offer enterprise 
customers high-speed storage and bandwidth on demand for less than half 
today's going rate is entering the increasing crowded optical market
Armed with $17 million in first round venture capital and a management team 
of former executives from Nortel and Alcatel, Ottawa, Ontario-based Akara 
Monday announced plans to offer service providers access to optical bandwidth 
for 50 to 75 percent less than today's costs. For enterprise customers, this 
will mean the availability of optical bandwidth on demand for new 
applications like high-speed storage and video on demand, said Ed Ogonek, 
president and CEO of the new concern. 
"What we're providing is a technology ...that allows you to better utilize 
the fiber infrastructure that you take out to a metro and the enterprise 
customer," he said. "We're focusing first on a technology that will better 
tie together multi-gigabit Ethernet ports onto a single fiber."
While other companies have focused on building up the optical network metro, 
core and backbone, creating large amounts of optical bandwidth in the network 
core, Akara will be focusing its efforts on providing efficient and less 
costly access to that core bandwidth, Ogonek said. As a result, large 
enterprise customers now buying multiple fiber links to deliver different 
high-speed services can consolidate those fiber channel circuits on a single 
fiber, he said.
Chris Nicholl, senior analyst at Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va., said 
that because the optical networking market is so competitive, Akara's success 
will depend on its ability to carve out a clearly defined market niche.
"The issues on the access side are how can you cost-effectively provide 
access to not just the next generation of services but the legacy services 
...in such a way that when the next generation of services are available 
you've got the infrastructure," he said.
But Tom Nolle, president of CIMI, a consultancy in Voorhees, N.J., said that 
his company has calculated that there are fewer than 1,000 company locations 
in the U.S. that can justify multiple optical feeds. In fact, companies 
usually can't justify multiple optical links unless they have 7,000 or more 
employees located at a site, he said.
"The bandwidth of the core ...will be unlocked by one and only one thing, and 
that's DSL ...because DSL can be made accessible to tens of millions of 
people," Nolle said. "Fiber is not going to serve a population of billions."
Y wou
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Folder Name: Telecom Technology: Fiber Optics 
Relevance Score on Scale of 100: 67

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