Verizon plans more 100G and 40G deployments

JANUARY 4, 2010 By Stephen Hardy -- While last month’s deployment in Europe represented Verizon’s first fielding of commercial 100-Gbps technology, sources at the carrier don’t expect it to be the last. Meanwhile, the door hasn’t closed on 40-Gbps technology in the Verizon network, either.

Verizon last month announced the deployment of a 100-Gbps link between Paris and Frankfurt using dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) with coherent detection technology from Nortel. According to Glenn Wellbrock, director of backbone network design, the choice of vendor and route was pretty simple: Nortel was the first vendor to have the technology commercially available, and Verizon had the necessary OME 6500 systems already installed on the high-traffic Paris-to-Frankfurt route.

The carrier is working with its other hardware suppliers on similar technology, Wellbrock says. “All of them have funded projects,” he reveals. “The timelines vary all over the place, everywhere from 6 months to 18 months away. But they are all on track to deliver the same type of performance, the same type of system.”

While Verizon has Nortel equipment in its U.S. network, the systems aren’t the most recent ultralong-haul models and therefore could not employ Nortel’s 100-Gbps technology. Thus, Verizon will look to its current roster of U.S. ultra-long-haul systems suppliers -- Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Ciena -- to deliver technology comparable to Nortel’s.

Alcatel-Lucent recently announced the addition of coherent detection to its product portfolio as well as a trial with Telefonica. Ciena has a 100G enterprise customer and is in line to purchase the Nortel Metro Ethernet Networks unit that delivered the technology Verizon is using in Europe. Nokia Siemens Networks has also begun to discuss its strategy publicly.

Meanwhile, Verizon may not be done with Nortel in Europe. While noting that the decision of where and when to deploy is in the hands of people such as Ihab Tarazi, vice president of global network planning for Verizon Business, Wellbrock says that some links, including those to London, would appear to be prime candidates for 100-Gbps upgrades.

“It comes down to a decision on what’s the granularity you need. If you’re going to use that much capacity on a particular route in one year’s timeframe, then I’m sure he’s going to use the 100G -- if he would have used ten 10s anyway,” says Wellbrock. “In conversation he seemed to indicate that there were several routes that would be candidates in the 2010 timeframe. I know that in the U.S. that there are quite a few routes that are candidates.”

Wellbrock listed New York to Washington, New York to Chicago, and New York to Boston as potential candidates.

With Verizon’s costs at near parity to 10x10 Gbps, Wellbrock says that 100 Gbps holds appeal for high-traffic routes where 50 percent or more of a route’s channel capacity is used up and at least another 10 channels are expected to be required within the next planning cycle.

“I think we’ll always use 100G instead of 10x10, at least at the cost points we see it coming at because of the spectral efficiency,” Wellbrock says of such cases.

Meanwhile, while OC-768 interfaces on routers are too costly for wide use in his opinion, “today, from a long-haul perspective, 40G is at parity [with 4x10-Gbps] if not better from our suppliers on the transport side,” Wellbrock says. He therefore sees Verizon deploying 4x10-Gbps muxponders in the near term to haul router traffic at 40G. “I think you’ll see us use a lot of them [in 2010] where it is 10G-type traffic, because we’re not going to use the 40G routers unless we really need to have them,” he says.

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