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As customer owned dark fiber networks combined with low cost WDM systems become prevalent,“customer empowered” optical network architectures where the customer controls the optical routing using exterior routing protocols may be possible. OBGP is a proposed extension to BGP for the manipulation of OXCs to permit them to be automatically setup and configured as BGP speaking devices to support multiple direct optical lightpaths between many different autonomous domains. With OBGP the routing component of a network may be distributed to the edge of the network, while the packet classification and forwarding is done in the core. OBGP may also allow customers at the edge to control a subset of lightpaths within another network’s wavelength cloud so that they can manage their own lightpath routing within that cloud. With the large number of adjacencies possible using OBGP lightpaths themselves may be used as a direct peering and transit mechanism between consenting ISPs. As a result the big driver for large capacity systems DWDM will may not be bandwidth but wavelength adjacency and transit services. The exchange of lightpaths may also allow for a simpler mechanism to allow for settlement in peering and transit between ISPs. In future there may even be wavelength commodity markets where ISPs can trade wavelengths and adjacencies on the open market. The proposed protocol extensions may also allow for the deployment of “carrier free” networks, where the customers at the edge control and route lightpaths across a carrier’s optical wavelength cloud.