ELLEN MANNING 400G DEPLOYMENT
BT’s national network control centre at Oswestry, Shropshire, UK.
Facebook when you need many of those connections, in terms of price the 200G will be much more attractive than 400G for the next six to seven years.” BOOSTING CAPACITY RATHER THAN SPEED Dr Kevin Smith, Head of Transmission, Futures & Innovation Technology at BT, points out that increasing capacity in already-present fibre in the core network is still potentially a cheaper solution than laying new fibre. “The more capacity you can put on a piece of fibre the better,” he says. “It’s one of the ways that you are keeping your cost down and more realistic and you are able to reduce the amount of cost that then flows through to all your products and services.” Dr Smith has already achieved record- breaking 5.6Tbps speeds in a field test carried out with Huawei between the BT Tower in London and the company’s research site Adastral Park in Ipswich, a distance of some 150km. For him, a 50% compound annual growth rate in tra c over the core network is not only a driver for innovation but also a reminder of the relatively urgent need for higher bandwidths. “You wouldn’t dream of deploying a 10G network now, the de facto standard is 100G per wave and BT has been deploying that for some time now, because of the capacity demands of broadband, growth in video, TV and other services such as mobile backhaul.” 200G AND RISING But innovation coupled with growing demands means that BT has already deployed 200G in several places. For Dr Smith, being ahead of the game when it comes to looking at how to deploy 400G across its core networks is vital in making sure they can scale gracefully. He said, “Is there a critical need for 400G right now? I would argue that there is already a pressing demand for 400G because of that 50% compound growth. “So in some links that interconnect some really tra c-hungry, demanding places, if operators are not careful they will run out of wavelengths. These areas are some of the hotspots that are driving optical innovation technology, and it’s very likely that is where we will see some of the 400G wavelength deployments.” While higher capacities bring their own scientific challenges, Dr Smith is confident that 400G is achievable. Furthermore, we can expect some announcements from BT on the subject in coming months, he says. “We are not talking about something which is absolutely imminent, we’re talking about something over the next few years. But it’s of great interest to us and we may in coming months be talking more about this area of research, as a precursor to us developing the technology for early deployment over the next year or two.”
400G PRODUCTS
Huber+Suhner’s Cube Optics 100G ROSA
Huber+Suhner’s Cube Optics Gen2 15.5mm ROSA
components and systems supplier Huber+Suhner, agrees and thinks the demands of 400G could open up niche opportunities for smaller companies. “With such developments, they are always driven first by the hyperscale data centres like Microsoft, and although that’s a big market it’s not the whole market,” he says. “Now not everyone can do everything so that opens new options for smaller companies to go into a niche, which is for a small company not a small niche but actually a giant market.” But while everyone admits that 400G transmission is necessary to keep up with growing data demands, cost will still play a part, Krueger thinks. “The telco maybe has di erent requirements to that of Google or Facebook data centre operators, or let’s say a car maker that runs a recent mid-size data centre. And, of course, especially in the hyperscale data centres, the rates are exploding and for them it’s all about power consumption. I think for the Googles and Facebooks, the electricity powering it all is the major part of the operation cost. Therefore a significant desire is also to reduce the electricity power demand.” The inevitably higher price of 400G could mean its widespread use doesn’t come quite as imminently as some might speculate, he says. “Probably what will happen is we will soon see 200G and this will just be the intermediate step towards 400G, like 40G was the quick, a ordable solution before 100G was ready. But the intermediate standard will remain for a long time the much cheaper solution. “So especially when you have Google or
Huber + Suhner’s Cube Optics Tunable CFP MSA-compliant DWDM 100Gbs
Oclaro’s CFP8 transceiver – ready for 400G
Oclaro’s Dual Micro iTL tunable laser – to drive 400G rates of the future
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
29
ISSUE 8 | Q1 2017
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker