FREMONT, Calif., June 18 -- The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced that it has reached a milestone in its work to advance the standards and methods of building optical networks with the very successful completion of a real-time interoperability demonstration during Supercomm 2001 in Atlanta earlier this month. Twenty-five vendor companies demonstrated User Network Interface (UNI) protocol-compliant optical cross connect switches, wavelength routers, protocol conformance test suites and edge devices including metro optical devices, IP/MPLS routers, ATM switches, SONET/SDH multiplexers and other devices that interface to, or form part of, the core optical transport network. Visitors to the demonstration viewed real-time dynamic control of connections across a mesh of different devices from 25 vendors. During the demonstration internetworking was demonstrated for both the optical control plane and transport layer, with clients setting up connections and passing data over the demonstration optical network. "It was very exciting to have these 25 companies come together for the first time in the industry to demonstrate how the optical UNI streamlines the core optical network," said Adam Dunstan, president of OIF. "The overwhelming success of this event speaks to the growing maturity of the UNI protocol. The OIF is already considering additional interoperability demonstrations to further benefit our members and the industry in the development of UNI." OIF member companies participating in the Supercomm 2001 interoperability demonstration included: Agilent Technologies, Alcatel, Avici Systems, CIENA Corporation, Cinta Networks, Cisco Systems, Inc., Coriolis Networks, Inc., Corvis Corporation, Data Connection Limited, Geyser Networks, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Lucent Technologies, Metro-OptiX Inc., Nortel Networks, ONI Systems Corp., Optisphere Networks Inc., Optivera Technologies, Redback Networks Inc., Spirent Communications, Sycamore Networks, Inc., Tellium, Inc., Tenor Networks, Turin Networks, Inc., Village Networks, Inc. and Zaffire, Inc.