Who’s Doing What with 40G, 100G

Paula Bernier
06/30/2008

Demand for 100G is not here today, but that’s good news considering commercial equipment to support 100G isn’t here either. Nonetheless, many vendors exhibiting at the NXTcomm show in June were discussing where they are with 40G today as well as their plans for 100G.

At NXTcomm, OpVista unveiled the OpVista CX8, based on the company’s technology known as dense multicarrier technology (DMC), which combines multiple carrier photonics, lambda stabilization and multilevel modulation to deliver 40G and 100G bandwidth per wavelength. As a result, service providers can upgrade existing 10G networks incrementally with 40G and 100G wavelength overlays, which can be injected into existing network elements as external wavelengths.

Infinera 100G Demo

But probably the most talked about 100G activity at the June event in Las Vegas was, as one prominent industry analyst termed it, “Infinera’s fake 100G demo.” He referred to it as such because the live demo by Avago Technologies (Nasdaq: INFN), Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA) and XO Communications between Las Vegas and Los Angeles provided 100 gigabits of aggregate bandwidth by combining 10 channels of 10gig each.

Infinera CEO and co-founder Jagdeep Singh recently spoke with xchange for a Q&A that ran in our June issue. During that interview, Singh said “... the industry talks a lot about higher speeds per wavelength, like 40gig per wavelength. It’s important to note that speed for wavelengths is in many ways a completely irrelevant parameter. It doesn’t determine anything that is of interest to the customer — it doesn’t determine the cost of the system, it doesn’t determine the capacity of the system, it doesn’t determine the reliability of the system. All those factors — capacity, reliability, power — are determined by capacity per chip.”

This statement has raised the eyebrows of many competitors in the industry, as did the Infinera demo at NXTcomm.

Competitors have suggested the Infinera 100G solution has limited reach. Another problem with this 10x10 method, explained Tom Goodwin, vice president of marketing and communications for optics at Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), is it requires 10 separate 10G ports on the router, which is an expensive proposition. And David Parks, product marketing director of Ciena (NASDAQ: CIEN), said with such a solution service providers would require 10 times the amplifiers and regenerators, which also is pricey.

The 100G Migration

The ideal way to get to 100G would be to leverage existing fiber, and other technology and gear from 10G and 40G iterations, to whatever extent possible, requiring the minimum possible new capital expenditure, as several of the traditional players in the optics space have told xchange.

Ron Martin, chief marketing and strategy officer for ADVA Optical Networking, said that as service providers went from 10G to 40G they wanted to do so with the same fiber, repeaters and other gear. The industry wants to get from 40G to 100G in the same way, he said.

Scott McFeely, vice president of product line management for Metro Ethernet networks at Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE: NT), which has been credited by analysts as being a leader in the 40G and 100G space, said: “We look at it as a continuum from 10G to 40G to 100G.”

Nortel unveiled its 40G solution early this year and showed the product at the OFC/NFOEC event. The product, which became generally available in May and has been awarded 14 contracts, 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 compensation requirements. McFeely explained that DP-QPSK allowed Nortel to use 10G laser technologies, which are “very reliable,” for 40G implementations. And he added that Nortel intends to use the same ASIC technology it uses for 40G to address 100G, on which it has done trials with Comcast.

40G and 100G

Meanwhile, Fujitsu Network Communications is retooling its 40G solution, which has been widely deployed overseas but didn’t take off in the United States, and is in development with 100G, said Randy Eisenach, market development director.

Fujitsu plans to announce later this summer a second-generation 40G product, which will entail new modules for the FLASHWAVE 7500. This new version will be half the size and lower cost than the first iteration 40G product from Fujitsu, to address the needs of U.S. carriers, Eisenach said, adding the solution also will use a different modulation technique (adaptive DPSK) than the first version.

While the industry already is talking about 100G, both Fujitsu’s Eisenach and Rich Moran, director of product marketing for the optical network systems division of NEC Corp. of America www.necam.com, noted that 40G is not widespread, in terms of the number of carriers using it, in the United States.

Of course, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: ATT) and Verizon Business, the country’s two largest carriers, have installed 40G, Moran said, but 40G deployments just got started in 2006. That’s despite the fact that at the millennium there were a variety of vendors, many of which have since disappeared, targeting the 40G space, he added. In any case, video traffic now is actually creating demand for 40G and beyond, Moran said.

Timing 100G

Conventional wisdom is that we’ll see 100G trials and early deployments in the 2009-2010 timeframe.

Nortel’s McFeely said that 100G transport products are expected to be commercialized by late 2009, with the delivery of 100G Ethernet client side devices being decided by the pace of standards work.

“We’re probably a couple years away from commercial applications on 100G networks, and that’s probably good,” said ADVA’s Martin.

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