The telecom industry is right up there when it comes to acronyms and complex naming schemes but it is probably no worse than other industries.
One only has to look at neighbouring IT and cloud computing in particular with its PaaS, IaaS and SaaS (Platform-, Infrastructure- and Software-as-a-Service).
But when it comes to agile optical networking and the reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM), what is notable is the smarts that are being added and yet all are described using the “-less” suffix: colourless, directionless, contentionless and gridless.
These are all logical names once the enhancements they add are explained. But as Infonetics Research analyst Andrew Schmitt has pointed out, the industry could do better with its naming schemes. Even the most gifted sales person may be challenged selling the merits of a colourless, directionless product.
Colourless is a term long in use for such optical devices as arrayed-waveguide gratings. So to expect the industry to change now is perhaps unrealistic. But could better names be chosen? And does it matter?
Well, yes, if it undersells the benefits new products deliver.
The four smarts
Colourless refers to the decoupling of the wavelength dependency, so is “wavelength independent” better? What about colourful? Sales people are on a better footing already.
Then there is directionless. The idea here is that the latest ROADMs have full flexibility in routing a lightpath to any of the network interface ports. So instead of directionless, what about ROADMs that are omnidirectional or all-directional?
"Even the most gifted sales person may be challenged selling the merits of a colourless, directionless product."
Contentionless means non-blocking, a well-known term widely used to describe switch and router designs.
And gridless comes from the concept of relaxing the rigid ITU grid for wavelengths. Again, a perfectly logical name. But it sells short the adaptive channel widths that new ROADMs will support for data rates above 100 Gigabit-per-second.
So third-generation ROADMs are colourless, directionless, contentionless and gridless products. But does colourful, all-directional, non-blocking and adaptive-channel ROADMs sound better?
Suggestions welcome.