Alcatel, Infinera 100 Gig Closer Than You Think

Basil Alwan of Alcatel "will be production shipping 100G in the next few months," he emails. They've delivered 100G that Softbank is demonstrating in Japan. Alwan claims "full service routing including all edge services (VPNs, QoS etc)."and proving that "already in several customer labs. ... We build our own silicon and have been shipping 100G packet processing / TM chips for awhile. In fact we first ramped this silicon around two years ago (introduced as FP2) and we used it for our 50G full duplex cards. Now that 100G optics are becoming available we simply re-configured the same deep touch chipset in simplex mode."

Rick Dodd of Infinera explained to me why 40 gig was late and disappointing while 100 gig is drawing enthusiasm. "The step from 10 gig to 40 gig was particularly tough because the modulation format changed to phase shift keying and that wasn't easy. 100 gig is also PSK so there are fewer obstacles. We expect 100G will be very big in 2012."

10G required only three optical components: a laser, a modulator, and a photodetector.. 40G's change to PSK and coherent detection literally quadrupled the number of components, from 3 to 12. The same components are used for 100G, running faster as Moore's Law improves performance. Most components, such as line system amplifiers, are little changed from 40G to 100G.

Alwan is proud that Alcatel is ready to deliver both the 100G router and 100G long-haul optics."Both sides of the fiber need to support 100G for it to be useful – the device that is the on-ramp to 100G (the IP/MPLS router) and the long haul optical 100G system. ALU has both – we just announced the 100G coherent long range optical product and demonstrated it. And in the IP/MPLS router our FP2 based 100G routing card is the only card in the industry that does single flow 100G (a true 100G packet processor). The parallels are interesting:
In optical we are the only vendor with single wavelength 100G (Nortel uses 2 waves and others use 4 or more). Naturally doing single wave 100G is more advanced, more difficult and better. In packet IP/MPLS we are the only vendor with single flow 100G packet processing and queueing (both Cisco and JNPR use two or four packet processing systems to handle the traffic). Again doing single flow is more advanced and better – when you have multiple forwarding complexes you have duplicated tables, devices which lead to more board space, more power and less density."
Cisco had a great Q1 but "Q1 was up for us YoY" at Alcatel. "We are not done taking share" Alwan concludes.Written by Dave Burstein Saturday, 12 June 2010 03:53

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