Nortel claims first commercial 100Gbps per wavelength

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 December 2009 03:31

Business IT - Technology

Nortel may be bankrupt but it has demonstrated that it is still a technology powerhouse by announcing the first commercially available 100Gbps per wavelength optical transmission technology with Verizon as its first customer.

Verizon has deployed the Nortel equipment into a live customer network on an 893km link between Paris and Frankfurt where the 100Gbps is carried on a single wavelength on a fibre carrying standard 10Gbps on other wavelengths. Telstra has also tested the Nortel 10Gbps technology, over a distance in excess of 2000kms.

The development has significance in the context of the NBN: its higher user bandwidths are likely to require capacity upgrades to backbone networks. Nortel says it has undertaken extensive modelling of traffic demands likely to be imposed on Australia's long haul domestic and international networks as a result of the NBN and it claims that massive upgrades will be required.

According to Nortel, its 100Gbps equipment "uses unique technology that allows service providers to increase the bandwidth of today's typical 10G infrastructure by ten times without the need to rip and replace major parts of the network...[thus removing] a significant cost barrier for today's service providers with constrained CAPEX budgets."

Commenting on Nortel's announcement, Ovum analyst Ron Kline, said: "Nortel has made tremendous strides with its high-capacity networking capabilities. The company made its 40G capability commercially available in 2Q08 and quickly captured a 25 percent share of the market. Nortel has sold 40G to over 50 customers. It can also tap into the many customers that have deployed the [Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 platform] and [common photonic layer] with 10Gbps that can be upgraded to 40Gbps and now 100Gbps.

"Similar to its 40Gbps approach, Nortel's 100Gbps solution can be deployed over other vendor line systems as an alien wavelength, increasing the applicability to non-Nortel customers."

Nortel's Metro Ethernet division is being acquired by Ciena and Kline added: "Ciena/Nortel can also tap into the opportunity to update Ciena's substantial base of embedded DWDM equipment."

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