Verizon says it is now ready to take the plunge. In another demonstration run on 1,520km of fiber north of Dallas, the telecommunications giant teamed with Finisar, NEC and Juniper put together the most complete 100Gps trial to date. Rather than just test a piece at a time, this demo sent video traffic via a 100Gbps interface to Juniper T1600, Finisar 100G CFP optical transceiver modules, and an NEC SpectralWave DWDM system equipped with 100G real-time coherent transponders. Wow, that was a jargon filled sentence – basically each step of the way was the real 100G deal. No substitutes, tricks, or emulations were involved.
While not all this gear is available commercially yet, it will be soon. Verizon expects that by the end of the year there will be sufficient product depth amongst equipment makers to support real network deployments and it intends to do just that. Of course, they already deployed 100G DWDM on a live route over in Europe, but that was a specialized case. Now all the pieces are coming together at last, after several years of hard work by researchers across the industry. No doubt we will see a parade of similar demonstrations this spring from other providers.
So what happens to 40G now? I suppose that depends on the economics. We are now at the point where we know 100G is technologically ready for prime time, but is it economically ready? It seems unlikely that there will be a huge rush for the first gear to hit the market – it took years for 10G to really take hold, and 40G is still fighting for that level of acceptance. But I suspect that 100G will have an easier time of it and 40G will fade into the background rather quickly now. The industry has been looking forward to this for a long time.
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AT&T, Opnext, Cisco demonstrate 127-Gbps transmission with live traffic
by Stephen Hardy | Lightwave
March 9, 2010
http://www.lightwaveonline.com/networking/news/ATT-Opnext-Cisco-demonstrate-127-Gbps-transmission-with-live-traffic-87115457.html?cmpid=EnlDirectMarch102010
I am not so sure that 100G will take hold so fast, at least not in the US on long routes. The reach is just not there and the cost of regeneration makes 100G economically infeasible. It won’t be until late 2011 or 2012 when various vendors have their soft decision FEC out that 100G will be comparable to todays 40G DP-QPSK. Then it will make sense. Until then, 100G on long routes will be individual case basis only for carriers based on customers who must absolutely have 100GE interfaces. But for plan capacity requirements, 4x10G on 40G modulated signals will be the way to go.