The optical crossconnect may have been one of the symbols of irrational exuberance during the telecom bubble, but they may yet make a comeback, according to Emanuel Nachum, vice president of Americas marketing for ECI Telecom.

As carriers deploy reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) with increasing numbers of “degrees” (or wavelength switching capacities), they will eventually want a next-generation optical crossconnect to manage all those connections more efficiently, Nachum said in a panel discussion on ROADMs at the NXTcomm trade show in Chicago today.

“We’re not there today,” he said. “These devices are still expensive.”

About three fourths of the ROADMs deployed today have just two degrees, said Current Analysis analyst Jason Marchek, another panelist. “The multi-degree ROADM market is still in its infancy,” he said.

Still, some carriers are beginning to talk to ECI, which has a 10-degree ROADM, about the usefulness of 14- and 16-degree ROADMs, Nachum said. “When you get to so many multi-degree ROADMs, at some point, it will make sense to have a different type of network element to manage this capacity more efficiently. This will probably be a next-generation optical crossconnect.”

Equipment vendors lost a lot of money on optical crossconnects a few years back. Nortel Networks famously acquired optical crossconnect startup Xros (pronounced “KY-rohs) for $3.25 billion in 2000, shelving the product in 2002. Lucent Technologies ended development of its LambdaRouter in the summer of 2002 after a lack of traction in the market. Sales of Corvis’ crossconnects had slowed to a crawl by 2003.

“I know several companies tried to develop [optical crossconnects] back in 2000,” Nachum said. “It was probably bad timing back then.”