Archive for 'January 2010'

You think this is easy?

January 12, 2010 3:06 PM by Stephen Hardy

Yeah? Then you should try it yourself. No, seriously -- I mean it. You should try blogging for Lightwave.

Not that I’m going anywhere -- I’m not. But it occurs to me that, with Meghan still too busy with young Tripp (who’s apparently starting to motor around upright and getting into all the expected kinds of trouble; thank you very much for asking) to write something here, we could probably use another voice or two on the site.

So I’m holding open auditions for bloggers. And, yes, that could mean you.

How do you take advantage of this opportunity for potential fame? (Notice that I didn’t add “fortune.” This is not a paying gig. Although certainly getting exposed to the industry by blogging on this site could convince other people to pay you to do things.) First, you have to get by me.

Things you need to do to get your blog idea past me:

1. Convince me you know what you’re talking about.
2. Talk about something germane to optical communications
3. Don’t use this space to try to sell something
4. Know and practice the difference between “opinionated” and “libelous”


Of course, once you get by me, you also have to impress our audience. Generate comments, page views, and other evidence of a burgeoning following, and I’ll let you blog away to your heart’s content. If not, well…

Interested? Drop me an email. All this could be yours…

Verizon's Wellbrock on router OC-768 port prices

January 5, 2010 2:27 PM by Stephen Hardy

As 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.