January 5, 2010As mentioned in the story I posted yesterday, Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone network design at Verizon, said that the carrier will likely buy “a lot” of 4x10G muxponders to carry 10-Gigabit Ethernet streams from core routers at a more spectrally efficient 40 Gbps. This is because the router vendors are asking too much money for OC-768 interfaces.
“OC-768 has been way higher than 4x10-GigE LAN PHY. And that’s what’s kept it from being, at least in our network, highly used or used everywhere,” he said. While praising transport vendors for getting 40G DWDM interfaces down to an attractive level, “it’s still not that way on the router side. They’ve been charging a real premium, and that doesn’t seem to be changing,” Wellbrock said.
That doesn’t mean Verizon hasn’t deployed any 40G router interfaces, however. “We use some OC-768, where you really need that amount of capacity and you need it all at once,” Wellbrock said. “But in many cases we use the 10-GigE LAN PHY because the cost delta is so big.”
Meanwhile, he's hoping that 100G router ports, which he expects to see this year, will be in the neighborhood of 5X or 6X 10G LAN PHY prices -- but that 10X might be attractive enough to get deployment rolling.
