Space-division multiplexing: the final frontier

System vendors continue to trumpet their achievements in long-haul optical transmission speeds and overall data carried over fibre. 

Alcatel-Lucent announced earlier this month that France Telecom-Orange is using the industry's first 400 Gigabit link, connecting Paris and Lyon, while Infinera has detailed a trial demonstrating 8 Terabit-per-second (Tbps) of capacity over 1,175km and using 500 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) super-channels. 

"Integration always comes at the cost of crosstalk"

Peter Winzer, Bell Labs

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Alcatel-Lucent demos dual-carrier Terabit transmission

"Without [photonic] integration you are doubling up your expensive opto-electronic components which doesn't scale"

Peter Winzer, Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs

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A Terabit network processor by 2015?

Given that 100 Gigabit merchant silicon network processors will appear this year only, it sounds premature to discuss Terabit devices. But Alcatel-Lucent's latest core router family uses the 400 Gigabit FP3 packet-processing chipset, and one Terabit is the next obvious development.

Source: Gazettabyte

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The post-100 Gigabit era

Feature: Beyond 100G - Part 4

The latest coherent ASICs from Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent coupled with announcements from Cisco and Huawei highlight where the industry is heading with regard high-speed optical transport. But the announcements also raise questions too. 

Source: Gazettabyte

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Latest coherent ASICs set the bar for the optical industry

Feature: Beyond 100G - Part 3

Alcatel-Lucent has detailed its next-generation coherent ASIC that supports multiple modulation schemes and allow signals to scale to 400 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps). 

The announcement follows Ciena's WaveLogic 3 coherent chipset that also trades capacity and reach by changing the modulation scheme.

"They [Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent] have set the bar for the rest of the industry," says Ron Kline, principal analyst for Ovum’s network infrastructure group.

 "We will employ [the PSE] for all new solutions on 100 Gigabit"

Kevin Drury, Alcatel-Lucent

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Boosting the 100 Gigabit addressable market

Alcatel-Lucent has enhanced the optical performance of its 100 Gigabit technology with the launch of its extended reach (100G XR) line card. Extending the reach of 100 Gigabit systems helps makes the technology more attractive when compared to existing 40 Gigabit optical transport. 

"We have built some rather large [data centre to data centre] networks with spans larger that 1,000km in totality"  

Sam Bucci, Alcatel-Lucent

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Alcatel-Lucent adds networking to enhance the cloud

Alcatel-Lucent has developed an architecture that addresses the networking aspects of cloud computing. Dubbed CloudBand, the system will enable operators to deliver network-enhanced cloud services to enterprise customers. Operators can also use CloudBand to deliver their own telecom services.  

“As far as we know there is no other system that bridges the gap between the network and the cloud"

Dor Skuler, Alcatel-Lucent

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