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The Year in 12 Stories
June 2013
DANTE, Infinera claim provisioning speed record
D ANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), the organisation that operates the pan-European GÉANT research and education network, says it installed and activated 2 Tbps of capacity and provisioned a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) service in less than 12 minutes combined. The pan-European network operator used production DTN-X platforms from Infinera, which have been deployed on the GÉANT fibre-optic network backbone as part of a substantial upgrade that began last year. F inisar and u²t Photonics have gained exclusive use of indium phosphide- based modulator technology developed at the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute (HHI). The two companies will also jointly develop the technology for transmitter designs at 100G and beyond. Finisar and u²t immediately gain polarisation multiplexed I-Q modulator technology for 100Gbps coherent applications following the agreement. Meanwhile, u²t has also acquired the assets of COGO Optronics U S carrier Verizon has demonstrated 200Gbps optical transmission over 260 miles of its optical network linking New York and Boston. The trial used equipment from system vendor Ciena that included the vendor’s WaveLogic3 coherent optical processor and test software to implement higher order modulation based on 16- QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation). The 16-QAM July 2013 August 2013
The Amsterdam-Frankfurt link was selected for the demonstration because this route is one of the busiest in Europe. The 671-km route included 10 spans and currently is in service carrying production traffic for the European national research and education (R&E) community. “When Infinera was involved in the procurement process for the GÉANT backbone they made a number of claims about their ability to turn up long-haul capacity very rapidly, and we decided to put those claims to the test,” said Michael Enrico, CTO of DANTE. GmbH, the former German operating subsidiary of COGO Optronics. Finisar says it has worked with COGO since 2009 to commercialise HHI’s indium phosphide Mach-Zehnder modulator technology for several of its 40G and 100G transceivers. The acquisition of COGO Optronics GmbH and the memorandum of understanding with Finisar and HHI further broadens u²t’s component portfolio. Known for its high- speed detectors and coherent receiver devices, u²t already
“The fact is that critical science experiments across Europe are generating immense quantities of data that are often difficult to fit into a forecasting process, so this ability to turn up, or redirect long haul capacity in a matter of minutes will help us transform the service we offer to our national research and education network partners.” The demonstration involved lighting up 2 Tbps of capacity over four 500-Gbps superchannels, and then provisioning a 100GbE service across the link. Infinera has released a time-lapse video of has gallium arsenide modulator technology which it claims has a performance similar to a lithium niobate modulator yet is considerably smaller. Indeed u²t expects gallium arsenide’s power and size, along with the company’s coherent receiver, to fit within the CFP2 pluggable module. Such an optical module design could meet long-haul requirements. Indium phosphide modulators do not match the reach performance of gallium arsenide but they are even smaller. Such designs could serve metro
the provisioning process. “This was a genuine test of our rapid provisioning capability, using real production equipment and software,” said Geoff Bennett, director of solutions and technology at Infinera. “If we had used conventional 100G transponders we would need a total of 40 of them – 20 at each end. But the Infinera 500G solution allows an engineer to provision up to five times as much capacity in a single operational cycle. Enabling our customers to use time as a weapon is a key value of coherent superchannels.” applications yet fit within a CFP4 package. Such compact line side designs will also be of key interest for Finisar. “We believe this new relationship with u²t and our joint exclusive access to HHI’s Mach-Zehnder modulator technology will enable the rapid development of new indium phosphide Mach-Zehnder modulators for next-generation 100G coherent long-haul line cards and pluggable 100G coherent metro transceivers,” said John Clark, Finisar’s executive vice president for technology and global R&D.
Finisar and u²t Photonics capture 100G coherent modulator technology
Verizon trials 200G long-distance transmission using 16-QAM
signal was carried over a single wavelength and occupied a 50GHz channel. The trial was conducted for over a month with the 200G traffic being sent alongside live customer traffic. “Proving greater spectral efficiency and a lower cost per bit, this trial illustrates the ability to double the traffic carrying capacity of optical channels with no change to the underlying infrastructure,” said Francois Locoh-Donou, senior vice
president, global products group at Ciena. Verizon reported in late 2012 that it had already deployed 100Gbps wavelengths in over 13,000 miles in the United States and 1,616 miles in Europe. The operator said increased video traffic, growth in data traffic from its LTE rollout, and cloud usage are driving increased capacity. The 16-QAM higher modulation scheme offers a way to double capacity but at the expense
of reach. Operators see the technology as a valuable way to extend capacity for links in shorter distance metro and metro/ regional networks. In February, Orange (France Telecom) announced that it had deployed the world’s first 400 Gbps per wavelength connection. The link between Paris and Lyon, a relatively short distance, used Alcatel-Lucent’s coherent processor and also used higher order modulation.
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