Eleven companies demonstrated the interoperability of the Open Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) 25 and 28 Gbps electrical interfaces. The nine demonstrations took place at ECOC 2013, held in London’s ExCeL. “The ecosystem is maturing,” said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mosys, one of the 11 firms that took part. “The demos are not just […]
The development of 400 Gigabit Ethernet has officially started with the launch of the 400 Gb/s Ethernet Study Group at the IEEE Standards Association. The group held its first meeting in Victoria, Canada, earlier this month. The process really got underway with the release of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report in August 2012, […]
The UK incumbent BT says it will begin to offer 300Mbps broadband service in the areas where it has rolled out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks. The service comes with a 20 Mbps upload speed and costs £50 per month plus BT line rental, which is currently £15.45 per month. Only a select few will be able […]
Over the past year, national research and education networks (NRENs) around the world have been upgraded their networks to 100-Gbps transmission speeds. But collaborative work has been hampered by the lack of high-speed connections between individual networks. Now a group of six networks has joined forces to set up an intercontinental 100-Gbps connection. During the […]
Finisar 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 […]
Telecom Austria subsidiary A1 has tested out a new technology from Alcatel-Lucent that aims to provide optical fibre speeds over the copper telephone network. In a field trial on installed lines, the broadband operator achieved data rates of over 1 Gbps over a distance of 70m. G.fast is a new standard, still several years from […]
Researchers at Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Alcatel-Lucent, say they have successfully transmitted data at 31Tbps over a distance of 7,200km, claiming a new world record for data transmission over a single optical fibre. This capacity exceeds that of the most advanced commercial undersea cables today by a factor of three, the company claims.The […]
Ciena, working with partners from the research and education community, is building a network to enable the development of software-defined networking (SDN) in the wide area network (WAN). The motivation in setting up the test bed network is to boost carrier confidence in SDN while accelerating technology development. “The goal is to leap to the […]
US 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 signal was carried […]
Two mobile backhaul chips for the LTE cellular standard have been announced based on very different architectures. PMC-Sierra has detailed the WinPath4, a programmable chip, while Broadcom has announced the StrataXGS BCM56450, a configurable Ethernet chip. Being programmable, the WinPath4 is flexible and can be customised whereas the BCM56450, with its greater throughput of 100Gbps, […]
The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has achieved its first milestone in defined the carrier requirements for software-defined networking (SDN). The goal of the OIF’s work is to make SDN “carrier grade”. The OIF’s Carrier Working Group has now moved on to the next stage, its Framework Document. “The Framework Document should define the gaps we […]
It’s a little over one year since Ciena unveiled its 400G coherent optical technology. Now it appears that 800G superchannels – tightly linked groups of wavelengths that can be managed as a single wavelength – are nearly ready for prime time. Working with BT, Ciena has carried out a series of pioneering trials […]
Alcatel-Lucent has created a business venture that plans to use software defined networking (SDN) to address data centre networking bottlenecks. The internal start-up, Nuage Networks, is tackling network connectivity within and between data centres. Networking in the data centre connects computing and storage resources. Servers and storage have largely undergone virtualisation such that […]
Optical transceiver developer Effdon Networks has demonstrated a 100Gbps CFP module with an 80km reach, which it claims is an industry first. The start-up has also developed the Qbox, a one-rack unit (1RU) extended-reach platform capable of 400–800Gbps and an 80–200km reach. The CFP is based on the 10×10 MSA. “We have managed […]
Silicon photonics is gathering speed, judging by the increasing number of foundry services that enable optical developers to share wafers and prototyping costs. The latest is available via US semiconductor foundry MOSIS, which has partnered with ePIXfab, the European support centre that coordinates low-cost multi-project wafer services for silicon photonic integrated circuits (ICs).
Optical switch specialist Calient Technologies and data centre switch developer Plexxi have joined forces to bring the benefits of a software-defined optical layer – namely increased flexibility and efficiency with decreased complexity – into the data centre environment. The integrated products were displayed at OFC/NFOEC in March. Aimed at large-scale data centres, this integration employs the major […]
Australian incumbent Telstra has successfully tested out 1Tbps optical transmission on a 995km link between Sydney and Melbourne using equipment from Ericsson. Ericsson said the test showed that 1Tbps technology can be deployed in a real network environment. Last month, Ericsson announced at Mobile World Congress that it had signed a deal to […]
The market for metro packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) is entering a new phase with platforms adopting packet-only implementations, Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching and 100G transport. These are the main findings of a survey of over 100 operators conducted by market research firm Heavy Reading. One surprise from the survey is the tremendous […]
Semiconductor specialist GigOptix, Inc. has partnered with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute (HHI) in Germany to develop a volume production process for 100Gbps pluggable CFP and CFP2 optical transceiver modules based on polymer technology. CFP modules support high-speed telecom applications such as coherent 100Gbps optical transmission. “This partnership combines the best 100-Gbps polymer technologies […]
France Telecom-Orange and Alcatel-Lucent claim to have deployed “the world’s first optical link with a capacity of 400 Gbps per wavelength” on a live fibre-optic link between Paris and Lyon. This connection represents an important milestone for long-distance terrestrial network technology, the companies say. The 400G wavelength increases overall capacity increased by a […]