Ciena adds 40G coherent optics

Quickly capitalizing on technology brought on board as part of its acquisition of Nortel’s metro Ethernet business, Ciena today said it added 40G coherent capabilities to its optical transport platforms via a new server blade.

Ciena’s 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform and CoreStream Agility Optical Transport System will get the 40 Gb/s coherent capabilities initially. Nortel demoed 100 Mb/s coherent capabilities before its fire sale and Tom Mock, Ciena’s senior vice president of strategic planning and marketing, said those capabilities will be widely available soon.

Service providers are making 40G optical transport purchases now and will make “significant” upgrades to 100G in the 2012/13 time frame, Mock claimed.

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. Ciena has completed trials of the 40 Gb/s coherent technology and will make the upgrade, along with related improvements to its network management platform, available to all customers in the second half of the year, Mock said.

Ciena recently rolled out its product road map following its Nortel MEN acquisition, tapping Nortel platforms on the high-end optical transport side while keeping Ciena products in place in the optical switching and carrier Ethernet areas. The move today adds coherent capabilities to Ciena’s own CN 4200 metro and regional transport platform. Ciena demonstrated optical interoperability and network management integration between its CN 4200 and Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 platforms at the recent OFC/NFOEC show in March.

Ciena’s 40G coherent capabilities use dual polarization quadrature phase shift keying modulation, coherent detection and electronic dispersion compensation to transmit four times as much information across existing 10G networks, Ciena said, without the need for compensators or amplifiers. That lets service providers boost their transport capacity using existing equipment and without a major network redesign, Mock said.