Verizon looking at 100G in the metro next year

Ihab Tarazi, vice president, global network planning at Verizon, told attendees as the Optical Society of America’s Executive Forum on Monday that he expects Verizon to field 100-Gbps technology in metro-scale links in 2013.

He added that Verizon also could begin to deploy flexible grid technology in the same general timeframe.

Tarazi, who provided the keynote presentation at the Executive Forum, said that Verizon has enjoyed significant cost, efficiency, and performance benefits on links where it has deployed 100-Gbps technology in the form of dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) with coherent detection. These include better cost per bit, efficient support of IP traffic, and reduced power and space requirements versus running 10 wavelengths of 10 Gbps. He added that the company had seen an average reduction in latency of approximately 15%. The run between New York and Chicago now enjoys 20% less latency, he added.

Verizon will use a similar technology approach in the metro as it currently uses in its other 100-Gbps deployments. While a number of metro 100G alternatives have sprung up – from 4x28 Gbps using either OOK or optical duobinary transmission, as well as 16-QAM – Tarazi revealed that Verizon intends to maintain the use of DP-QPSK when it begins deployments early next year.

Meanwhile, the use of flexible grid technology on ROADMs has been closely associated with 400-Gbps transmission. Two firms – Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent – have used OFC/NFOEC this week as a platform to announce the imminent arrival of their respective 400-Gbps offerings, and Ciena currently is Verizon’s 100-Gbps technology supplier. However, Tarazi stopped short of saying that 400-Gbps would appear in Verizon’s networks shortly on the heels of the deployment of flexible grid technologies, whose rollout schedule he said would depend in part on the availability and performance of the technologies. Tests of such capabilities are expected to be conducted this year.

Interesting, Tarazi suggested that 400 Gbps may find a role in metro networks before it appears in the long haul. Metro networks typically carry more traffic than long-haul, he said, because most communication is local.