The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) announced a 24% attendance increase at this year’s Cable-Tec Expo, held November 15-17 in Atlanta. Judging by the population on the show floor many of those attendees were staffers at optical communications equipment vendors, many of whom visited at the show for the first time in a while looking for customers for their new 100-Gbps capabilities.
Here’s what a few circuits around the show floor revealed:
Huawei used the event as a coming out party for its 100-Gbps capabilities, which currently are available in both muxponder and transponder configurations. The company demonstrated 3,000 km of error-free 100-Gbps transmission using the OptiX OSN 8800 in partnership with Corning, which supplied its SMF-28 ULL optical fiber for the purpose. The company already has Hibernia Atlantic as a customer (see "Hibernia Atlantic plots transatlantic 100G course after trials with Huawei") and now has its sights set on expanding into other deployments. In addition to the 100-Gbps DP-QPSK with coherent detection capabilities on display, Huawei Technologies (USA) Vice President – Optical Network Marketing and Product Management Reg Wilcox said the company also would offer a coherent 40-Gbps offering based on DP-BPSK. BPSK is often used for submarine and other very long reach applications. Wilcox said the company will not offer 40 Gbps using coherent DP-QPSK, preferring its direct-detect enhanced DQPSK approach for most terrestrial requirements.
Fujitsu Network Communications beat the SCTE 100-Gbps rush by demonstrating the capability at last year’s event. Traci King, marketing and communications manager at Fujitsu, confirmed that the company’s 100-Gbps capabilities were on track to meet the year-end availability target previously announced (see "Fujitsu unveils 100-Gbps plans"). The company has at least two customers who are now trialing Fujitsu’s technology prior to deployments; King declined to name them.
Ciena also touted its 100-Gbps capabilities in the background of its more prominent focus on Carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul and business services support – a common theme among most of the optical transport vendors on the show floor.
Infinera literally backed the truck up to deliver its 100-Gbps story, parking a trailer on the show floor to demonstrate the capabilities of its DTN and recently announced DTN-X platforms. The company also announced that cable MSO Midcontinent Communications has purchased more DTN platforms, as well as ATN metro edge boxes.
Cisco shoehorned into a corner of its booth a demonstration the of newly released 100-Gbps capabilities for its ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform packet-optical transport system (see “US Signal turns to Cisco for 100-Gbps network upgrade”). The demonstration had attracted about eight staffers from Time Warner Cable when Lightwave visited the booth.
One company that was conspicuous for not showing 100-Gbps technology in its booth was Alcatel-Lucent. The company is one of the few (perhaps the only) with an announced cable MSO customer for coherent 100-Gbps optical transport (see “Shaw Communications adds 100G to fiber-optic network”). However, Clayton Wagar, senior director of MSO solutions at the company, said that Alcatel-Lucent’s prowess at 100G is already well known and therefore he and his staff felt that the focus on its SCTE Cable-Tec efforts should be on more MSO-specific initiatives, particularly its Velocix offering for content delivery networks.
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