Telecom Ramblings

Musings on fiber, IP, data, content, and new things telecom.

Nortel Demos 100GbE over Single Wavelength 100G

December 19th, 2008 by Rob Powell · 1 Comment

Nortel Networks (NT: chart, news) has joined the 100G demo group with a cool demonstration over 800 kilometers of fiber using a single wavelength. The main difference from the recent Ciena (CIEN: chart, news) demo seems to be that they used a real 100Gbps Ethernet signal generated by a box from Ixia (XXIA: chart, news) rather than taking ten 10Gbps signals and combining them. You can see the Ixia logo in the Youtube video near the end.

Yes, they put the demo on Youtube – which basically consists of a hardware engineer named Dave pointing at and naming every cool device in his lab at Nortel, then hitting one with a hammer to show that it still works afterward.





He reminds me of someone from college, betchya nobody else is allowed to touch that hammer…

I think we can safely say that 100G is coming, it seems like the technical hurdles have been overcome across the board. The question now is making it economical and building a production device. What’s it going to cost?

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Read more on Nortel Networks, Fiber Optics, Ixia at Wikinvest

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  • Jonas says:

    Nortel using a pre-standard 100GbE client signal instead of 10×10GbE is one difference compared to the Ciena demo but probably more interesting is the different DWDM line interfaces. While both use dual polarizations and (D)QPSK modulation, Nortel uses coherent instead of differential detection which makes the solution more tolerant to PMD and other distortions. In addition, Nortel actually uses two wavelengths within one 50 GHz slot to transmit 112 Gbps.

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