Telstra tests Nortel 40G & 100G DWDM gear

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 August 2009 04:53

Business IT - Technology

Telstra is claiming two "world records" announcing the successful completion of trials of Nortel's 40Gbps and 100Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing technology over world record distances in its long haul fibre network, but it is already planning to use Ericsson 40Gbps DWDM gear to carry commercial services between Sydney and Melbourne; gear that Ericsson claims will be upgradeable to 100Gbps as soon as the standard is finalised.

Announcing the trial Telstra said that "A continuous 2038 kilometre fibre optic link between Adelaide and Sydney was used for the 100Gbps trial, while the 40Gbps trial took place over 3370 kilometres on a looped-back section of the Sydney to Adelaide route. Both trials used Nortel optical technology on existing Telstra fibre."

Vice President, carrier networks, Nortel Asia, Anthony McLachlan, said that Nortel and Telstra had been able to achieve a milestone by transmitting 100Gbps data on Telstra's existing fibre optic network over an unprecedented distance of 2038 kilometres without the need to refresh or regenerate the data at any point.

This bodes well for Telstra's ability to upgrade its backbone long haul network to meet the demands expected to be imposed upon it by the National Broadband Network, which will, supposedly provide 90 percent of the population with access bandwidths of 100Mbps.

The announcement co-incided with claims by Nortel that its estimates for the demands that the NBN will place on backhaul networks showed that the current 10Gbps DWDM technology would be unable to produce sufficient bandwidth on current fibre networks.

Another very important ability of Nortel's technology, not mentioned in Telstra's press release is its claimed ability to operate on fibre of almost any age. Another Nortel executive, Ryan Perera, told a Telecommunications Society of Australia meeting in Sydney on 31 July that ""We can run 100gig on 15 year old fibre. The age of the fibre has nothing to do with it any more, thanks to the dispersion compensation techniques we use."

Telstra announced in July that it would upgrade its Melbourne-Sydney optical fibre link, which is driven using DWDM equipment from Ericsson by quadrupling from 10Gpbs to 40Gbps the data throughput on each optical wavelength in the fibre.


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