Alcatel-Lucent takes 100G coherent plunge

Alcatel-Lucent today stepped up its game in the optical space, announcing the imminent commercial availability – and not just a road map – for a new 100 Gb/s DWDM platform featuring what it is calling “next-generation” coherent capabilities.

Up to now, rival Ciena – in large part via its Nortel MEN acquisition – has been most aggressive with the commercial availability of both 100 Gb/s platforms as well as coherent technology. (See: Ciena adds 40G coherent optics.)

Coherent capabilities allow service providers to stretch their optical transport reach with fewer repeaters, cutting costs, as well as realize faster speeds, even over older copper plant. Alcatel-Lucent’s coherent implementation takes that efficiency a step further by enabling deployment over a single carrier wavelength, rather than bundling two carriers together to get to 100 Gb/s rates.

Alcatel-Lucent is primarily making the 100 Gb/s coherent capabilities available as a card upgrade on its 1830 Photonic Service Switch (reaching densities of up to 500 Gb/s per box), though it will ultimately be deployed on all of its DWDM platforms. The vendor has tested the technology with Telefonica, has a named customer for it in Japan’s Softbank Telecom and has a number of operators interested in trials.

Several industry trends – including converged backbone transformation and IP offload, data center interconnection and general optical capacity scaling – are driving service providers to higher-speed transport requirements, said Alberto Valsecchi, vice president of marketing for Alcatel-Lucent’s optical business. Overall, Alcatel-Lucent’s focus from an operational perspective was to make the 100 Gb/s platform “very easy to manage and configure, basically zero touch, much like a traditional Sonet/SDH-type network,” Valsecchi said.

“This is a big part of our converged backbone transformation story,” he said. “It’s a way to optimize IP backbone networks through strong integration at the IP layer, with core routers, and the photonic network – we’re talking very optimized and cost-effective backbones running at 100 gig.”

Alcatel-Lucent touted several advantages of its single carrier coherent technology, including better fiber utilization (including the ability to run 100 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s transport side by side), longer transmission reach, and power and operational cost savings. Several key Bell Labs innovations drive the coherent capabilities, including an implementation of 100 Gb/s PDM-QPSK modulation and a next-generation coherent receiver featuring custom built analog/digital converter and digital signal processor chips, Valsecchi said.