Just on the heels of our Packet Optical Networking Conference last week in San Jose we’re thrilled to announce another network operator has selected Cisco to make the transition to 100G. Last time was in the upper mountain state of Wyoming. This time it’s DukeNet Communications, a leading regional fiber network provider offering data and high-capacity bandwidth services to enterprise, data center, government and carrier customers. Primarily serving the southeastern United States, DukeNet controls an 8,000 route mile fiber-optic network now capable of delivering 100 Gbps services using Cisco’s nLight™ coherent Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology. The Cisco ONS 15454-powered solution provides Read More »
This is Fiber Tap? Light Reading.com had an interesting article recently on the potential impact of coherent optical technology on submarine cable capacity, which in many cases was built for the old “10 Gbps Information Super Highway”. Today, the Internet is much more than that, with mobile, video, and cloud services dominating growth. The key point is that new technology is enabling existing systems to be easily upgraded from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps simply by replacing the DWDM equipment, without the cost to deploy new cable and other costly fiber infrastructure. As a result, companies which specialize in undersea cable deployments face economic challenges because of the lack of needed new projects. Why buy new when you can supercharge existing assets, especially in this economy?
The Visual Networking Index predicts we’re going to hit nearly a zettabyte of traffic by 2015. Applications such as video and cloud services are consuming bandwidth on the network to the point that 10 Gbps infrastructure is insufficient. Without question, 100 Gbps technology in the data center, network core and edge, and transport is a key enabler to remove bandwidth constraints. Cisco is leading the industry in 100Gbps technology across network architecture, and two major acquisitions recently in the 100 Gbps optical component space drive innovation, reduce costs, and improve performance for our customers.
The first acquisition was CoreOptics, a Digital Signal Processing solution designer which was completed in 2010. CoreOptics provides silicon technology to deliver 100 Gbps coherent optical signals on existing (10 Gbps) fiber infrastructure. This means customers can upgrade to 100 Gbps and beyond without incurring tremendous costs. They can do this regardless if their existing fiber network is Cisco, Alcatel, or Nortel/Ciena. It’s the best 100Gbps DWDM solution in the industry with ultra long haul distances (up to 3000 km, as validated by EANTC) and highest density (3x the competition). Even better, we’ve already shown that it’s capable of taking transmission to 400 Gbps and 1 Tbps super-channels in the future.
The second acquisition, Lightwire, is a silicon photonics company with technology to enable cost-effective, very high-speed optical interconnects using CMOS-based silicon photonic optical transceivers. In non-technical terms, “CMOS” (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) is the industry standard for manufacturing chips without need for exotic materials or processes. This means lower power consumption, higher densities, and lower costs, all of which are critical to reducing the operational cost and carbon footprint of data centers as they scale to 100 Gbps and beyond. With this technology in-house, the advanced silicon optical technology can be utilized across our entire product portfolio.
Our customers are very positive. We’ve announced a number of successful trials in our long-haul DWDM solution, including US Signal, Lumos, and SURFnet. Look for more to be coming soon!
Cisco is the first to deliver 100G at 3,000 km distances without the need for complex Raman optical amplification technology or signal regeneration signals. This distance is 50-percent further than any non-Raman alternative solution on the market today.
What does this mean?
Well, by eliminating the need for Raman amplification, regeneration and dispersion compensation, carriers can add 100G services on top of existing infrastructures originally designed for 10G technology. That means better investment protection and a simpler network upgrade process.
The Cisco solution has been tested at a number of service providers and research networks, including US Signal. The performance was also validated by EANTC, the European Advanced Network Test Center.
For more detail, follow the live links embedded above.
In case you might have missed it (or don’t read Russian) I wanted to call out two newsworthy items related to Cisco and 100G technology.
Last week at CiscoLive! London we announced the availability of 100GE interfaces on the Nexus 7000 to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks in the data center and help our customers meet the demands of emerging cloud computing applications. With this announcement Cisco becomes the only vendor in the industry offering an end-to-end 100G solution which includes the core (CRS), edge (ASR 9000), data center (Nexus 7000), and coherent DWDM optical transport (ONS 15454 MSTP). Furthermore we’re also one of only a handful of companies in the networking industry that owns (through our acquisition of CoreOptics) the underlying technology needed to make 100G (and beyond) a cost effective reality. With the high forecasted growth rate of the global Internet we believe that our customers will strongly benefit from the unique breadth of our solution to meet both their business and technology requirements.
Cisco end-end 100 Gbps Solution-- Core, edge, optical, data center.
