Addressing service providers’ need for more bandwidth due to growing multimedia demands and ever-fatter customer interfaces, Nortel on Wednesday formally unveiled the 40/100G Adaptive Optics Engine, which plugs into the vendor’s Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 to enable carriers to up their capacity to 40G and 100G – and without major upgrades from 10G architectures.
According to Nortel, other solutions on the market that promise to provide 40G may require new fiber optic cables to be buried across the carriers’ service area. However, Nortel said it employs dual polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK) with coherent detection that allows 40G operation over a 10G network as well as advanced digital signal processing that removes all compensation requirements from the network, along with their associated capital and operational expenditures.
Scott McFeely, vice president of product line manager for metro Ethernet networks at Nortel, explains that the QPSK part of the encoding scheme provides twice the sampling rate of a 10G baud signal, which means a service provider can use it to overlay existing 10G designs, components and lasers. The dual pole piece, meanwhile, transmits on X and Y axis’, he says, so you get four signals on a 10G baud rate.
Danish service provider TDC http://tdc.com/ and the U.K.’s Neos Networks are the first named customers of the Adaptive Optics Engine. TDC will use the new Nortel gear initially to carry TDC European network traffic across the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany. It is now testing 40gbps products and services with the intent of launching such services late this year. Neos, which is initially deploying a 10G network, plans to trial the 40G network elements next month. Neos is using the Nortel gear to support its Liquid Bandwidth offer, which allows customers to purchase bandwidth a la carte.
“For the most part, the vast majority of [service providers] are all looking at deploying 40gig in the next two to three years in their networks,” says McFeely, adding that Verizon, with its ultra long haul initiative, is among that list.
“From a service provider perspective right now they are facing a number of pulls that are driving up the bandwidth requirements in the network and stressing the current infrastructure,” says McFeely. “From an anecdotal perspective, if you look at sites like YouTube alone, the users are consuming as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000. We’ve got 70 percent of U.S.-based Internet users are now using the Internet to stream or download Web-based video. You got a stat of something like a million iPhones sold in the first quarter of availability, and all capable of being video devices. If you do the math on the transition of video sources from standard definition to high definition formats, the increase in bandwidth can be staggering.” At the same time, he adds, client side interfaces of 10gigE and 10gig Fibre Channel are not unusual.
Nortel’s 40G solution will be available at the end of April, with the 100G version, which the vendor showed at the recent OFC NFOEC event, in customer trials now and slated for commercial availability late in 2009.
