The future of transport in the metro area

[lists.nanog at monmotha.net (Brandon Martin)]

On 8/2/19 4:10 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:
> Now, the next step in all this that is starting to gain a bit of
> traction is "spectrum", i.e., rather than take a normal grey service
> from a Transport operator, have them deliver you a portion of the DWDM
> spectrum so that you can run as much bandwidth as you want over their
> network. Think of it as dark fibre, but lit...

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?  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.
-- 
Brandon Martin