JANUARY 18, 2010 -- Telefonica has conducted yet another field trial of 100-Gbps technology. The latest trial used equipment from Ericsson.
During the 100-Gbps field trial, Telefonica and Ericsson used a live network route, and previously deployed Marconi MHL 3000 equipment. 100G is the next breakthrough in optical transmission, representing a 10 times advance on what is most commonly deployed today around the world.
Such an advance will be needed in the coming years to cope with the bandwidth growth happening as a result of consumer demand for high-bandwidth services, such as TV, vdeo, peering, Ericsson officials say.
Making such a large capacity jump using existing resources makes excellent economic sense to the operator, who at low incremental capex can avoid unnecessary opex costs of introducing new network infrastructure and support services and can lower cost per bit and power consumption per bit in the network. The ability to show protection of current and past investments and increased return on investments is equally important.
The section of the trial that Ericsson was involved in was the Zaragoza – Pamplona – San Sebastian – Bilbao route, of 850 km. Full compatibility with 80-channel ROADM infrastructure was demonstrated: with four ROADM plus two terminal/fixed multiplexers (equivalent to five ROADM) pass-through, carrying multiple types of in-service lower bit-rate traffic. The key demonstration of the Ericsson trial with Telefonica was to use the installed network to provide the new capacity.
This is the third announced trial of 100-Gbps technology in which Telefonica has participated. Previous trials used equipment from Alcatel-Lucent (see "Alcatel-Lucent integrates coherent detection on its optical platforms for 100G") and Huawei (see "Huawei, Telefonica complete 1000-km 100G commercial trial in Spain").
In this trial, first-generation MHL 3000 systems were used, but with more modern equipment / newer amplifiers and more favorable attenuation per link, longer distances such as 1200-1500 km would certainly have been possible, and have already been demonstrated elsewhere, Ericsson says.
“Our approach to 100G is similar to how we delivered 40G, we started trialing that and displaying the upgrade option for currently installed systems in 2006 and by 2008 were deploying it commercially with DTAG, and we added China Telecom and Telstra amongst others in 2009,” says Vinai Sirkay, head of product area optical & metro, Ericsson. “Now we are in the development phase on our 100G offering and these kinds of trials with major operators are very important proof points for the technology, as it prepares for commercial readiness in the coming year or two. Aside from many demonstrations to customers of 100G in our lab environment, we had the very successful DTAG field trial, showed the 100G cards at tradeshows last year and have more customer trials coming soon.”