Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) is bringing its European 100G experience back across the Atlantic. Today they have announced plans to deploy the latest technology on selected segments of their US backbone by the end of Q2. The lucky routes include Chicago to New York, Sacramento to Los Angeles, and Minneapolis to Kansas City. Really, they need 100G on a north south route across the great plains? Not exactly your usual bottleneck there, but hey what do I know. Perhaps the key there isn’t overwhelming traffic, but rather a route on which they are comparatively fiber-poor.
Verizon’s first commercial 100G deployment came on its Paris-Frankfurt route over in Europe more than a year ago. Earlier this month they implemented the first standards-based 100GE link on that same route. They did do some 100G demos on other routes, including one on a longhaul segment north of Dallas, and another in the metro. While there have been other demos, Verizon is clearly blazing a trail here in terms of commercial 100G deployments.
The equipment powering their US buildout of 100G will be Ciena’s coherent optical transport solution combined with Juniper routers. That’s the same gear they started with on the Paris-Frankfurt route — apparently, it’s working well for them.
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Categories: Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment
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North-South to close rings in middle of US where they are fairly aggressive in wireless 4g rollout. Just a thought….
Probably. In the US, north – south routes are comparitively fewer than east – west. If you want to close your E-W rings, you need some fairly high capacity N-S. That said, I doubt Minneapolis is on any of the main east-west routes, so they may have other motivations as you suggest.