Alcatel-Lucent offers 400-Gbps IP router interface

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) says it will offer 400-Gbps line cards for its 7750 Service Router (SR) and 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS) IP routers in the second half of this year. The capability will come in the form of a one-port 400G line card that leverages the company's FP3 400G routing processor (see "Alcatel-Lucent makes 400-Gbps play").

At the same time, Alcatel-Lucent will offer a Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching User Network Interface (GMPLS-UNI) to help coordinate IP and optical layers of service provider networks. Such a capability can provide operational gains of 40%, according to a recent Bell Labs study.

With 100-Gbps interfaces now becoming widely deployed in carrier fiber-optic networks, Alcatel-Lucent believes that some customers are ready to migrate to even higher optical transmission rates. The "clear channel" 400-Gbps capability obviates the need to aggregate large IP streams over four 100-Gbps wavelengths. Such high traffic volumes may be encountered between operators' data centers and between their metro aggregation and core networks, Alcatel-Lucent says.

The line card and its integrated tunable optics support direct connections between routers over what the company described as "hundreds of kilometers" as well as transmission of alien wavelengths over a DWDM network. The line card is compatible with fielded 7750 SR and 7950 XRS IP routers, Alcatel-Lucent adds.

"Network operators are looking for efficient ways handle the video- and cloud-fueled traffic growth in their networks," commented Michael Howard, principal analyst, carrier networks, at IHS-Infonetics Research via an Alcatel-Lucent press release. "Alcatel-Lucent's new 400G IPoDWDM line card helps by eliminating the complexity of 100 Gigabit Ethernet link aggregation and WDM transport with a 400G direct router-to-router link. This industry-first 400G IP networking line card is based on Alcatel-Lucent's 400G FP3 silicon, which has been in the field since 2011, and provides new router-to-router scaling for data center and data network interconnect applications."

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