MARCH 13, 2008 � MSO Comcast Corp. (search for Comcast) will conduct a trial of 100-Gbit/sec transmission using equipment from Nortel (search for Nortel). The trial will occur during the 71st meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference which Comcast is hosting in Philadelphia this week.
Comcast and Nortel say the network trial will be first time real traffic will be transmitted over a 100G wavelength on its existing network that is also carrying live 10G and 40G links. The trial will run in parallel over the same optical infrastructure that supports a combination of high-definition video, Internet, and voice traffic on Comcast's 40G national backbone network.
The Nortel 100G equipment, based on the company's 100G Adaptive Optical Engine, is designed to operate with comparable performance to today's networks. Nortel is using a combination of dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying, coherent detection, and dispersion compensation technology similar to that already fielded and marketed as eDCO. (See more details here.)
"Testing an interoperable multi-vendor 100G solution will help provide us with important information about how new solutions will support a next generation of high-bandwidth services for the digital generation of consumers," said John Schanz, executive vice president, national engineering and technical operations for Comcast. "As we continue to expand our cross-platform video, voice, and data services, we need these types of innovative technologies from vendors like Nortel to support the rapid growth of new applications and services that run over our network."
The 100G trial will run for the rest of this week and span the Comcast infrastructure from Philadelphia, PA, to McLean, VA, over Comcast's metro and long-haul fibers. More than 1,200 of the world's top Internet engineers are expected to attend this IETF meeting and make use of this high-speed network to access the Internet.
Nortel has supplied much of the hardware installed on this link, including Common Photonic Layer DWDM equipment with 50-GHz enhanced Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (eROADM) and photonic components, augmented with prototype 100G interfaces installed in Nortel's Optical Multiservice Edge 6500.
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