Infinera has been one of the optical industry’s disruptors, helping to boost capacity and lower the costs of both inter- and intracity networks. Now the company is turning its attention to subsea networks, as evidenced by its demo of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC)-based DTN system that transmitted data over a 4,000-kilometer, third-party subsea network. Infinera DTN has 25 Gigahertz (GHz) channel spacing vs. 50GHz spacing on the pre-existing equipment — in other words, double the network capacity.

Subsea systems typically have subsea optical amplifiers and submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) located in terrestrial landing stations and connected to the either end of the amplifier chain. With its new DTN system, Infinera has replaced the pre-existing SLTE systems. With bandwidth demand continuing to grow at about 50 percent a year, innovations like these are what’s necessary to keep our digital lives humming.

I’m a geek groupie when it comes to technology. I can’t actually produce any of these life-changing products, but I can recognize something cool when I see it. And the 100-Gigabit data transfer demo that Ciena was showing off at SC 08 in Austin, Texas, today was very cool. Unlike previous demonstrations, Ciena’s was a 100-Gigabit data transfer over a single channel, rather than one aggregated over multiple channels.

The product isn’t available for commercial use yet (and there’s no date set for when it will be), but when it is, customers will be able to upgrade their existing fiber equipment with the Ciena kit to 100G. Other players, from Infinera to Alcatel-Lucent, are also trying to deliver 100G networks. Those speeds will help the core network handle the anticipated growth of Internet traffic, and lower the per-bit cost of delivering that traffic. In the video below, Dimple Amin, vice president of R&D and special projects at Ciena, talks about the demonstration, what it does and how far such traffic can travel. He also says there’s no technical reason why these speeds couldn’t be delivered at the edge of  the network to consumers’ homes. That would be the day.

Drew Perkins, the CTO of Infinera, which sells Internet optical transport equipment, says that video is soaking up the Internet’s bandwidth — and lucky for him, driving the optical networking business.

For those of you who don’t know what the optical transport layer is, it’s the bottom layer plumbing of the Internet. Back in 2000/2001 when Perkins and his colleagues started the company he was optimistic that the Internet would still grow significantly — and of course they were proven right. “Back then, we thought the optical transport layer was about 10 gigabit technology. We’ll need some thing more than 40 gigabit, up to 100 gigabit and higher as the Internet grows.”

What’s driving the growth? Video. “Video traffic is clearly the biggest consumer on the Internet,” and the addition of video traffic swamps all other traffic. “Video will completely swamp the network,” and there will be exponentially increasing bandwidth demand as video applications grow.

This effects the optical network industry because service providers will have to buy more capacity and deliver it faster. Every year, more technology means more workload. But with conventional technology this will break the network and cause huge problems, says Perkins. Infinera is looking to use photon-integrated circuitry to help solve this problem.