OFC/NFOEC 2010: Announcements round-up

A brief review of some of the eye-catching announcements emerging from this year’s OFC/NFOEC being held in San Diego this week.

The Infinera Express: Infinera's 80-foot-long truck-based mobile demo unit, is at OFC/NFOEC. Infinera is part of a demo of live 100 GigE data traffic with Juniper Networks, Finisar, Opnext and Reflex Photonics. The truck also contains Infinera’s ATN metro edge platform.

Demonstrations and displays

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is displaying components and hardware as part of its integrated transmitter and receiver initiative for 100Gbps transponders.

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Verizon plans coherent-optimised routes

Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone network design at Verizon Business, was interviewed by gazettabyte as part of an upcoming feature on high-speed optical transmission.  Here are some highlights of what he shared. The topics will be expanded upon in the upcoming feature.

 "Next-gen lines will be coherent only"

 Glenn Wellbrock, Verizon Business

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OFC/NFOEC 2010: Technical paper highlights

At this year’s OFC/NFOEC, to be held on March 21-25, all the main themes driving optical networking are represented:  40 and 100Gbps transmission, coherent detection, photonic integration, and the latest in optical access such as WDM-PON.

Here is a sample of some of the noteworthy papers.

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Framing the information age

Maurice Broomfield is a 94-year-old photographer who has documented examples of 20th century industry. His lifelong work is about to be shown at two exhibitions in the UK, as detailed in an interview with the Financial Times. It made me wonder whether anyone is doing the equivalent for telecom and datacom? Mega data centres as IT cathedrals?

When writing features for FibreSystems Europe, I repeatedly asked for high-resolution striking images. The magazine's editors always wanted photos that included people, like Maurice Broomfield's photos.  Getting hold of such images did happen but not often.

Inspired by the Financial Times’ interview and Maurice Broomfield's beautiful images, some of the better images sent are presented here.

IBM data centre

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UNIC silicon modulator

Kotura has detailed a compact, low-power silicon-based optical modulator; an important building block to enable dense on-chip optical interconnects. The modulator operates at up to 11Gbit/s, consumes 0.5mW and has an area of 1000µm².

This is the silicon photonic start-up’s first announced modulator. The design has been developed in conjunction with Sun Microsystems as part of the DAPRA Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) programme.

An image of the modulator and a cross-section diagram of the ring waveguide. Source: Kotura

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Service providers' network planning in need of an overhaul

Operators are struggling to keep up with the demands being placed on their networks. Greater competition, quicker introductions of new services and uncertainty regarding their uptake are forcing operators to reassess how they undertake network planning. 

These are the findings of an operator study conducted by Analysys Mason on behalf of Amdocs, the business and operational support systems (BSS/ OSS) vendor.

Columns (left to right): 1) Stove-pipe solutions and legacy systems with no time-lined consolidated view 2) Too much time spent on manual processes 3) Too much time (or too little time) and investment on integration efforts with different OSS 4) Lack of consistent processes or tools to roll-out same resources/ technologies 5) Competition difficulties 6) Delays in launching new services. Source: Analysys MasonClick here to view full chart

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Optical core switching tops 4 Terabit-per-second.

After the launch of Alcatel-Lucent's 1870 TTS optical core switch, three experts comment.

Event:

Alcatel-Lucent has launched its 1870 Transport Tera Switch (TTS) that has a switch capacity of 4 Terabits-per-second (Tbps). The platform switches and grooms traffic at 1Gbps granularity while supporting lightpaths up to 100Gbps.

“It is designed to address the explosion of traffic in core networks, driven by video and the move to cloud computing among others,” says Alberto Valsecchi, vice president of marketing, optics activities at Alcatel-Lucent.

The 1870 TTS supports next-generation Optical Transport Network (OTN), carrier Ethernet and SONET/SDH protocols, as well as generalized multiprotocol label switching/ automatically switched optical network(GMPLS/ ASON) control plane technology to enable network management and traffic off-load between the IP core and optical layers.

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It [the 1870 TTS]  is designed to address the explosion of traffic in core networks"

Alberto Valsecchi, Alcatel-Lucent

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