5G? 6G?? How About 200G?!

Back in 2013, Verizon ran a successful 200 Giga-bits-per-second (200Gbps or 200G) trial in collaboration with communications equipment manufacturer Ciena. The trial was done over optical fiber using a single wavelength. Well - trials are trials - done in optimized and controlled laboratory type settings by people in white lab coats. Experts speculated whether these kinds of bit rates could be achieved in the real world. Well.... guess what?

Earlier this month, Verizon provisioned 200G technology using the same Ciena gear on an ultra-long-haul production network between Boston and New York without impacting live customer traffic on the same network and without making any modifications to the existing fiber or network infrastructure equipment. The new Ciena gear was only added on each end of the communications channel.

Significant? You bet. More information on a single wavelength over long distance without any loss of signal quality. All this without having to upgrade fiber and infrastructure equipment in the field. It opens the door for the possibilities of much higher bit rates over existing fiber-based networks. We'll see 400 Gbps soon and yes even Tera-bit-per-second (Tbps) rates over existing optical fiber infrastructure soon.

Closing the loop with IP/Optical Integration

I've spent the last 17 years focused on Internet Protocol (IP) over various transport systems - wired (copper), wireless and optical. With the explosion of video, social media and other bandwidth hungry applications we've seen fiber moving closer and closer to the end user. Wireless is the perfect example with towers back-hauled into the network by fiber. It's really just the last mile/final connection that is typically not optical fiber based for most of us.

We're seeing IP/optical integration today really ramping with these things called software defined networks (SDNs). I wrote a post defining and describing SDN's last month titled SDN: When The Hardware Becomes A Little More Soft

With the move to all-IP, SDN and cloud services, many service providers are now integrating IP routing and transport. In this short 4 minute and 50 audio clip, Arnold Jansen discusses how IP/optical control integration can help operators simplify and streamline their operations and drive better cost synergies.



 Smart, fast, efficient. Good stuff.