Alcatel-Lucent brings 100G to the edge

Two years ago, service providers threatened makers of 40G gear that they might skip 40G altogether and move to 100G. Those threats died down the following year, in part because 100G wasn’t expected to be standardized until 2009 or 2010. Meanwhile vendors including Nortel Networks were able to sell a lot of 40G long-haul gear designed to allow carriers easy upgrade paths to 100G.

But the IEEE is now expected to complete 100G standards by next June, around the time Alcatel-Lucent plans to start selling its new edge cards, according to Lindsay Newell, Alcatel-Lucent’s vice president of marketing. “The basic definitions are fairly solid and well defined,”  he said. “It’s a question of, over the next nine to ten months, going through final signoff and approvals. The IEEE isn’t likely to change its mind.”

Verizon Business, for one, has said it is planning to deploy 100G in core networks next year.

But by introducing 100G at the edge, just two months after Juniper Networks, for example, introduced it for the core, Alcatel-Lucent is clearly trying to get ahead of the market, anticipating rapid traffic growth in access networks resulting from VDSL and video use. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent will also start selling VDSL2 bonding gear in next year’s first quarter, increasing the bandwidth to consumers’ homes.