NOVEMBER 19, 2007 By Meghan Fuller Hanna -- Verizon (search for Verizon) today announced that it has successfully concluded what it claims is the industry's first field test of 100-Gbit/sec serial optical transmission, on a live, in-service 312-mile (504-km) network route between Tampa, FL, and Miami.
The test, which utilized a live video feed from Verizon's national FiOS TV network as the "payload," was successfully completed last Friday, November 16th. The 100-Gbit/sec transmission was conducted on a Verizon Business ultra long-haul optical system carrying other live traffic at 10 Gbits/sec.
In a telephone interview this afternoon, Glenn Wellbrock, director of network technology development, confirmed that Verizon employed Differential Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (search for DQPSK) as the advanced modulation scheme for supporting the 100-Gbit/sec serial stream.
Verizon generated its own 100-Gbit/sec traffic by taking 10-Gbits/sec worth of FiOS TV traffic and duplicating that traffic ten times. Those 10-Gbit/sec streams were multiplexed into a single 100-Gbit/sec stream, explains Wellbrock, and that stream was then transported between a single transmitter/receiver over a single wavelength for a true serial transmission.
Much like the carrier's earlier 40G trials, this trial employed what Verizon calls a "plug and play" approach; the technology was used without any changes to the fiber, amplifiers, and other embedded equipment. Verizon selected Alcatel-Lucent's 1625 LambdaXtreme Transport system--standard equipment already in place to carry 10-Gbit/sec traffic--for last Friday's trial.
As for the decision to conduct the trial over a 504-km route between Tampa and Miami, Wellbrock says that route was selected for its close proximity to its Video Super Headend in Tampa. The carrier wanted to showcase a 100-Gbit/sec serial transmission trial using video traffic, and Tampa provided the most convenient access to that kind of traffic.
Wellbrock confirms that Verizon is targeting the end of 2009 for commercial deployment of 100G, which would make the migration from 40G to 100G much faster than the migration from 10G to 40G. The reason, he says, is two-fold. First, the technology jump between 10G and 40G was much greater than the current leap from 40G to 100G. Optical transmission at 10 Gbits/sec used traditional on/off keying (OOK). Transmission at 40G, by contrast, required "doing something smarter with the light," resulting in the development of such advanced technologies as coherent detection and advanced modulation schemes like DQPSK, which are now being leveraged to support 100G.
Second, he says, there is "push from the rest of the industry" to move to 100G, namely within the standards bodies. The IEEE Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) is currently working on a client-side interface, while the ITU-T Study Group 15 is developing OTU4 to define the transport for 100G.