Infinera goes 40 Gb/s, looks beyond 100 Gb/s

Optical switch vendor Infinera announced new products and customer wins in advance of the NXTComm trade show next week and hinted at future products with significant increases in capacity.

First, the newly public company announced a 40-Gb/s module for its DTN optical switching platform, following a similar announcement from Ciena earlier this week. The module, available in October, maps a 40-Gb/s service to four 10-Gb/s wavelengths on a 100-Gb/s line card. The vendor’s photonic integrated circuits allow carriers to “decouple” the service bandwidth from the line rate of the network it rides upon, Infinera said, thereby overcoming some of the obstacles of high-speed transmission, such as polarization mode dispersion.

“We have 100 Gb/s of capacity you can use any way you want,” said Serge Melle, Infinera’s vice president of technical marketing. “You can put 40 2.5-Gb/s services on a [chip] or 10 10-Gb/s services or a couple of 40-Gb/s services. You can mix and match without being constrained by whatever constrains 40-Gb/s transport.”

The company also hinted at future products beyond 100 Gb/s. Within the next year, the company expects to introduce a new chip that contains multiple integrated semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), dramatically boosting its capacity. At an optical networking trade show in March, Infinera demonstrated a ten-channel chip with an integrated SOA. “Ultimately, Infinera believes that its large-scale photonic integration technology can implement dozens of SOAs on a single chip,” the company said today.

“Today we ship systems that have 100 Gb/s [chips],” Melle said. “We’ve demonstrated [chips] that have 1.6 terabits [per second] of capacity--40 wavelengths at 40 Gb/s each, all on a single [chip]. That’s pretty enormous.”

Also today, the company unveiled a new version of its DTN optical switch tailored for non-telco customers such as cable operators, Internet service providers and research and education networks. The new MTC, available next month, puts the same functions of the existing 23-inch switch in a 19-inch chassis more popular with non-telcos. “More and more” ISPs are in the market for optical gear these days, Melle said, citing Google as an example. Google has been rumored to be an Infinera customer in the past, though the vendor won’t comment on the subject. The only ISP customer Infinera has announced so far is Germany’s Freenet.

Infinera also named a new customer today: Southwestern competitive local exchange carrier Deltacom. In a press release issued by Infinera, Deltacom’s Executive Vice President of Operations, Jim O’Brien, praised the DTN for its simplicity and rapid deployment abilities which, he said, “[allow] Deltacom to respond to unforeseen capacity demand in a matter of days.”

In regulatory filings earlier this year, Infinera claimed nearly 30 customers, the largest of which by far was Level 3 Communications.