Alcatel-Lucent debuts 100G ethernet in edge routers & switches

Stuart Corner
Friday, 17 July 2009 12:05

IT Industry - Strategy

Alcatel-Lucent has announced what it says is the first 100Gbps network interface for the edge of service provider networks "where they need it most."

According to Alcatel-Lucent, it will help service providers "meet the massive bandwidth demands caused by explosive growth in video traffic and sophisticated consumer and business IP services," and enable them to "to simultaneously reduce the cost per bit of IP transport, substantially, while also enhancing their network to deliver increasingly sophisticated high value services."

However the new products will not be commercially available until mid 2010. They will take the form of 100Gbps interfaces for the company's 7750 Service Router and 7450 Ethernet Service Switch (ESS). Users in Australia and New Zealand include Uecomm, Nextgen and AAPT and  Telecom in New Zealand.

The higher throughput is enabled by Alcatel-Lucent's 'home-grown' FP2 chipset, which has been incorporated in shipped products since mid 2008. According to Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "The fact that these products use the Alcatel-Lucent FP2 silicon that's been shipping for over a year helps reduce risk as service providers move to 100 Gigabit interfaces within their networks."

Demand from service providers for this technology is already building. Verizon announced earlier this year that it was testing 100Gbps capabilities "in an effort to move the industry toward production quality 100Gbps in 2010," and has been reported saying it is planning commercial deployment in the same year.

A number of vendors, Juniper, Ciena and Cisco among them already have 100Gbps interfaces for their core routers. Juniper announced a 100Gbps interface for its T1600 core router, again not available commercially until 2010, with Roger Geerts, Juniper's systems engineering manager ANZ, saying that "every tender we see now has a requirement for 100GE," adding that, although 100GBE transport technology is in it is early stages he expected that, by the time the 100GBE interface is commercially available early next year this would become more pervasive. .

Ovum recently highlighted a decision by financial exchange group NYSE Euronext to deploy pre-standard 100G transport, to connect data centres in New York and London as showing the latent demand for the technology. Ovum predicted that 100Gbps transmission technology would evolve rapidly in response to growing demand for the reduced latency that the increase in bandwidth over established 10Gbps technology, and the newer 40Gbps technology would bring.

In a recent blog post, Luc Ceuppens, vice president of product marketing in Juniper's high-end systems business unit, noted that the IEEE's standard for 100Gbps ethernet was nearing completion and eagerly awaited, after a long delay.

"The timing for the new 100 gigabit Ethernet standard, and the first products supporting it, is almost perfect: the current economic downturn, networks requiring more bandwidth and carriers looking for ways to reduce costs all contribute to create a market ripe for expansion – provided the economics are workable."

He noted that John D'Ambrosia, chair of the IEEE 802.3ba task force, had been quoted saying "Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. And there is pent-up demand for 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit ethernet."

Ceuppens added that, in addition to carrying more data 100Gbps ethernet opens up new possibilities brought about by reduced latency. "Examples include new advanced disaster recovery networks or the ability to transform data centres into real-time 'application centres' as the delay between user and server can be significantly reduced," he said.