Verizon goes live with 100G

After years of trials, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) has lit its first 100-gigabit-per-second link on a live commercial network, the company announced today, as it prepares to convert the vast majority of its North American long-haul network from 10-Gb/s to 100 Gb/s.

Verizon provisioned what it calls a “true” 100G link between routers on its private IP network in the more than 900 kilometer span connecting Paris and Frankfurt, Germany. That means a wavelength carried 100-Gb/s in the same 50-gigahertz channel space that only carried 10 Gb/s in the more than 30 other wavelengths beside it in the fiber.

Verizon reached this milestone – the industry's first live, commercial 100G network – by upgrading the long-haul optical gear already in place in its European private IP backbone: Nortel Networks’ OME 6500 platform, which has been deployed by many carriers to migrate from 10-Gb/s to 40-Gb/s networks but whose 100-Gb/s capabilities are only now becoming available.

“It couldn’t be an overlay vendor,” said Stu Elby, vice president of network architecture. “It had to be whatever vendor was there. This vendor happens to be Nortel.”

In North America, Verizon uses three long-haul vendors: Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN), which is in the process of acquiring Nortel’s optical portfolio, including the 6500. Verizon has been testing all three vendors’ 100G gear in the lab and expects at least one of them to reach commercial availability of 100G next year. When that happens, Elby said, “We’ll start looking for routes in the US that are exhausting [capacity] and put them in. We’re ready to go.” 

Verizon has been deploying 40G gear to relieve congested routes in early 2007 and will continue to, but Elby said the vast majority of its upgrades in North America will – like the European link touted today -- jump from 10G straight to 100G.

“The cost per bit looks like it’s going to be less expensive at 100G,” Elby said, not counting legacy 40G technology. “It might have to do with the fact that the vendors are projecting better volumes. 40G has had a very slow start. If we put 40G in, we put it in in the last 18 to 24 months at the most. Also, the performance of 100G is better in terms of some of the bad fibers, with high [polarization mode dispersion]. Most 40G solutions really struggle or can’t run at all on some of the bad fiber we have. There’s routes in North America where we just can’t do 40G; 100G works quite well on those.”

Ciena CEO Gary Smith mentioned Nortel’s strength over bad fiber as a key attribute in the properties being acquired. But now Nortel has a first-to-market advantage in 100G that will also bear fruit for Ciena.

“We’d like to think, and we hope, that Ciena and Nortel come up with a way where Ciena, on their current installed base in North America, could utilize the capabilities that Nortel already has,” Elby said. “But it’s sort of out of our hands.”

Carriers have been debating skipping 40G for 100G for years. One of the factors thought to have delayed 100G development is the way the market has been fractured by multiple competing modulation technologies. Verizon hopes to help remedy that confusion somewhat with the move announced today, which used DPQPSK (differential polarization quadrature phase shift keying) modulation. The carrier is hoping its embrace of DPQPSK will convince vendors to unify around it, yielding economies of scale and ultimately driving prices down.

“If we get everyone to build with the same modulation format, we’ll have commonality of chips,” Elby said.

Verizon wants to upgrade its US long-haul network to 100G before it converts to a next-generation technology that isn’t yet available: a mix of Optical Transport Networking (OTN) and multiprotocol label switching – transport profile (MPLS-TP). Chips don’t exist for that combination today, and Verizon is working with vendors to produce them, anticipating available gear sometime in 2011.