OpVista to Debut 40G/100G Optical Networking at NXTcomm

With all the bandwidth-hungry traffic coming onto to carrier networks, there’s a need to expand capacity not just in access networks, but also to address aggregation and increase the girth of pipes in transport networks -- and to do so affordably and in a way that takes up as little real estate as possible. One company helping address these issues is optical networking equipment supplier OpVista. At NXTcomm next week in Las Vegas the company will publicly unveil the OpVista CX8 optical networking system.

This optical networking system is based on the company’s recently announced Dense Multi-Carrier technology (DMC) and designed for service providers wanting to upgrade from 10gbps to 40gbps and 100gbps fiber networks.

DMC combines multiple carrier photonics, lambda stabilization and multi-level modulation to deliver 40G and 100G bandwidth per wavelength over any type of optical network from metro to ultra long haul. 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. This means substantial savings, as compared to conventional 40G technology, according to OpVista.

Optical Networking

With fiber capacity of 8tbps, the OpVista CX8 optical networking system supports such bandwidth-hungry services as HD video and video-on-demand – supporting up to 1 million simultaneous HD signs on a single fiber. An on-board ROADM allows for dynamic and cost-effective network reconfiguration, and integrated packet aggregation grooms traffic from multiple service connections.

The OpVista CX8 optical networking system with DMC technology, for which the company declined to provide pricing, is in trial deployments with service providers in the U.S. and Europe.

A system with 10G wavelengths, an integrated ROADM and packet aggregation is generally available starting this month. Support for 40G transponders will be added in the fourth quarter.

Dana Cooperson, vice president of optical networks at research and consulting firm Ovum, said as broadband access demand has ramped up, optical innovation and vendor competition have spurred the carrier spend on DWDM to almost tripled from 2003 to 2007 to $5.8 billion globally; meanwhile, transport costs have tumbled from pre-DWDM levels of more than $2,000 per gigabit per second per kilometer in 1993 to less than $1 per gigabit per second per kilometer in 2007, beating Moore's Law. This exponential improvement won't continue without a step-function improvement in system economics that is not expected for another five years, said Cooperson. However, the Ovum analyst commented, “this year there have been several promising 40G innovations, available now or expected by year-end, including Nortel's home-grown technology, which offers the best performance on the market and a clear path to 100G; OpVista, which has optical networking technology that could have a particularly positive effect on the viability of 40G in metro networks; and progress by Stratalight, Mintera, and others towards standardized 40G modules. Infinera, through technology it will release this year and next, is another vendor on the road to attack cost-capacity-distance stagnation with 40G innovation.”

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