The test used Infinera’s technology across 800 kilometers of a special type of fiber called Dispersion Shifted Fiber. This DSF Fiber is used in Japan, but currently can’t handle some of the advanced techniques companies are using to add more capacity to existing fiber. From the release for those who like the technical bits:

DSF fiber, deployed throughout Japan, has proven to be a challenge in deploying high-capacity dense wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transport technology due to low chromatic dispersion in the C-Band, making it difficult to achieve high capacity optical transmission over long distance economically. As a result, capacities have been severely limited and have had to utilize expensive L-band technology to achieve long haul quality performance from the DSF fiber.

When using the same Infinera gear over modern fiber strands, the equipment can deliver 8 Tbps over distances of 2,500 kilometers, showing that even certain types of fiber aren’t as future proof as we might think, given our insatiable demand for bandwidth.

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At the event, Huawei demonstrated the latest 100 Gbps single wavelength coherent technology and is also demonstrating co-transmission with its 40 Gbps coherent solutions at 50 GHz channel spacing.

Michael Kennedy, principal analyst at ACG Research in an interview with Fierce Telecom extolled the virtues of Coherent technologies.

“Coherent technology actually makes 100 Gbps cheaper than non-coherent, though for now it is more costly because it’s a newer technology. With coherent, think of it as a light beam with all of the light tightly aligned, but with non-coherent, the light would be more diffused. The coherent beam would look like a pen light if you shined it at the moon; the non-coherent would be like a flash light. Coherent reduces the need for amplification and increases the distance. It reduces chromatic dispersion, so you can have wavelengths set closer together, and you would need fewer sub-channels.”

Here are some of our previous posts about 100 Gbps networks.

• Under the Atlantic Ocean, data zips at 100 Gbps.
• Verizon delivers 100 Gbps speeds to US Internet backbone
• We will soon live in a 100 Gbps world

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Infinera worked with Pacific Crossing to show off its long-haul undersea 100 Gbps technology under the Pacific ocean in October 2011. (Press release PDF) That subsea trial spanned more than 9,500 kilometers on Pacific Crossing’s PC-1 fiber from California to Japan and was the first and longest successful 100 Gb/s trial performed across the Pacific delivering digital coherent transmission. However, the sub-Atlantic trial could see a faster commercial deployment it seems.

The trial involved Huawei’s latest 100 Gbps single wavelength coherent technology. In addition to performing across distances greater than 5,000 km, the trial has successfully demonstrated long-term, error-free transmission at 100Gbps. Huawei also successfully demonstrated co-propagation of 100 Gbps wavelengths at 50 GHz spacing which enables future upgrades of subsea capacities up to 5 Tbps.

Michael Kennedy, principal analyst at ACG Research in an interview with Fierce Telecompointed out that”

“Coherent technology actually makes 100 Gbps cheaper than non-coherent, though for now it is more costly because it’s a newer technology. With coherent, think of it as a light beam with all of the light tightly aligned, but with non-coherent, the light would be more diffused. The coherent beam would look like a pen light if you shined it at the moon; the non-coherent would be like a flash light. Coherent reduces the need for amplification and increases the distance. It reduces chromatic dispersion, so you can have wavelengths set closer together, and you would need fewer sub-channels.”

Writing in the same Fierce Telecom article, Dan O’Shea noted that 100 Gbps would make its impact mostly in long haul networks as metro networks have different economics. The success of this trial is allowing the companies to move forward on their aggressive deployment schedule, including 100 Gbps connections between Halifax and Montreal and between Amsterdam and London by Q1 2012, followed by other key routes later in the year, Hibernia said in a statement. We are slowly but surely inching towards mass scale deployment of 100 Gbps technology in the long haul networks. But then we have been saying that for a long time. Finally, the real world is catching up.

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TeliaSonera, a Scandinavian-based telephone company, has conducted a trial for an optical network that saw a terabit-speed optical transmission based on 500 Gbps super channels. A super channel is a large unit of optical capacity created by combining multiple optical carriers into a single managed entity — like an optical cloud of sorts. This is the largest super channel created so far, and it is based on Infinera’s 500 Gbps photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

The trial used the Infinera gear and was conducted between Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., a distance of 1,105 kilometers. Previous terabit trials utilized multiple 300 Gbps channels.

In April 2011, Verizon and NEC tested a terabit backbone in Verizon’s fiber network in and around Dallas. Scientists have been pushing for networks toward 100 terabit speeds. The move to these higher-speed and high-capacity networks is part of the coming terabit age. As we are connected to more places more often, we are putting new kinds of demand on the networks, and there is a need for more capacity. “As 10 Gb/s services proliferate and 100 Gb/s router ports emerge, we are trialing advanced solutions that scale optical networks beyond 100 Gb/s,” said Erik Hallberg, the president at TeliaSonera International Carrier.

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We want more information and we want it now, so technologists are racing to keep up. On Thursday, Infinera said it will support 5 terabits of capacity on its latest gear, while a startup just scored $19 million to make data flow faster across chips. From the long haul to microscopic hops, scientists are trying to push data at the speed of light.

The long haul

Streaming Netflix movies, real-time high-definition video conferencing and interactive services such as Turntable.fm are all changing the way we interact with and use the web. We need more capacity, and we need lower latency (i.e. lag time), and the only way to do that is to add more fiber. Verizon is doing its part with fiber to the home and by deploying 100 gigabit per second fiber pipes across the country for long-haul transit, while Google and others are trying to build fiber-to-the home networks in other parts of the country.

At the same time as consumers and businesses guzzle down bandwidth-hungry applications, they’re also tuning into the Internet from more devices. Providers such as Comcast have seen the broadband usage rise inside homes as tablets and mobile phones tap into the Wi-Fi networks more often. If we ever get to a point where we are streaming all of our content or keeping all of our data online in the cloud, then we’re going to have to bolster the networks feeding the last mile to the home.

Bringing those massive pipes into the terabit age is behind Infinera’s new product, gear that can deliver 10 channels of 500 gigabit per second capacity, or enough to download every single movie that’s on Netflix in 5 seconds. It’s also enough to provide 100 Mbps broadband to every household in Los Angeles, so you can see that as fiber to the home deployments become more common, this will become necessary.

The itsy bitsy hops

Infinera’s gear pushes wavelengths across continents and under oceans, but bandwidth bottlenecks don’t just occur in the broadband pipes, they can occur between the cores and memory on chips. In fact, Infinera’s big breakthrough was that it replaced the electronics on its chips with optics — instead of copper interconnects it uses light — saving time and energy because it didn’t have to convert light back to electricity. That kind of innovation was big for long haul networking, but now it’s becoming more important in all networking as companies try to deliver real-time applications and analysis of data.

The chips those machines run on are getting more powerful through adding more cores, but communicating between those cores on a chip or between chips inside a server requires its own terabit capacity — and light may once again the best way to provide it. Thursday, Skorpios Technologies raised $19 million from Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Cottonwood Technology Fund and Sun Mountain Capital to commercialize a method for integrating photonics onto a chip using standard chip manufacturing methods.

Skorpios isn’t alone in its quest for on-chip photonics; both Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are researching the topic, as well as scores of scientists inside universities. This is a difficult problem, and it’s unclear how Skorpios contributes to solving it because the company declines to share the details of its technology, but its ability to do so within the existing manufacturing industry set up around making chips is an advantage.

Let there be light

As the Internet expands, and our networking relies more on light to transmit digital information, we’re going to need the same technology inside our computers. Right now, it’s akin to the post office sending mail via today’s vehicles and at some point along the route switching over to horse-drawn carriages. It’s a gap that technologists will close, and the big question is when and what it means for the way we build out infrastructure and applications. Those are questions I can’t wait to see people answer.

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Infinera has demonstrated that it can build an integrated optic transmitter capable of delivering terabit per second speeds, paving the way for growth of the next generation of the Internet. A few weeks ago, I explained how the world is moving toward a 100 Gbps speeds in the coming years, but this sort of development will help feed the capacity of the Internet for decades.

The Infinera terabit photonic integrated circuit (PIC) transmitter integrates ten wavelengths, each operating at 112 Gbps for an aggregate data rate of 1.12 terabits per second. Infinera showed off a receiver that can achieve terabit-per-second speeds last week. These optical components will live inside networking gear to deliver fast speeds to telecommunications, between data centers and in undersea cables. At the consumer level, a 1 Tbps PIC could enable the download of one high-definition movie file in a fifth of a second, or support the transmission of two million simultaneous videoconferences—all from a single pair of chips. According to an Infinera paper released today, the transmitter increases the number of bits one can jam into each wavelength of light running through the fiber. Infinera says it is able to increase the spectral density through something it calls FlexChannels. From the release:

FlexChannels are designed to implement Terabit channels more cost-effectively than conventional discrete-based optical networks because the integration of large numbers of lasers and other optical components into PICs reduces the cost-per-bit of reaching high levels of fiber and system capacity. …. Chief Strategy Officer Dr. David Welch described photonic integration as the key enabler for the next phase of network evolution. “As we collapse layers in the network, PICs are the technology that enables us to deliver a Digital Optical Network with unconstrained bandwidth throughout the network, pervasive, integrated switching, and the capability to deliver additional packet features cost-effectively,” Dr. Welch said.

Infinera’s 500 Gbps PIC is planned to be commercially available in Infinera systems next year, and systems based on PICs with 1 Tbps capacity still to come. Terabit speeds won’t just help deliver faster speeds to homes and business, but will also enable far more applications in the cloud, from sending petabytes of information to a constant access to vast compute resources. I’m not sure what all you could do with it, but I can’t wait to find out.

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Equipment and network companies such as Ciena and Adtran are reaping the rewards in their stock prices: Ciena’s stock has risen more than $14.74, or 117 percent in the last six months, while Adtran’s has risen by $14.46 — or 47 percent. Other industry players such as Infinera and Tellabs, however, have seen their stock prices fall. But Infinera is about to announce new products aimed at ushering in “The Terabit Age,” which may offer a boost. Corning, which provides the actual glass that goes into the ground for fiber networks, has seen its share prices rise by $6.70, or almost 42 percent, in the last six months.

Meanwhile, cloud computing and connecting data centers to faster and fatter networks has led to a new round of investment in fiber providers. From Allied Fiber –which launched last year — building a new type of network that combines the pipe with the processing capacity at data centers along the fiber pathways, to GE Capital providing $230 million in available credit to Lightower Fiber Networks, a dark fiber provider that has purchased three different fiber companies in the last six months.

Jimmy Yu, Sr., director of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group, said in a report released earlier this month that:

“[T]here is a need to increase deployments of higher speed optical wavelengths such as 40 and 100 gigabit. We, therefore, raised our forecast and now project that in the total WDM market, which includes both metro and long haul, 40 gigabit wavelength shipments will grow at a CAGR of over 40 percent and the recently available 100 gigabit wavelengths will grow at a CAGR over 200 percent. By 2015, the combined 40 and 100 gigabit wavelengths may contribute up to $4.7 billion of optical revenue.”

Fiber Inside the Cloud

As fiber between data centers makes wired networks faster, the onus is on the networking providers inside data centers to boost their speeds. This means innovations such as Fujitsu’s creating of an all-optical switch that will keep packets that come into the network at light speed in their optical format as long as possible before converting them to electronic signals. This keeps the packets whizzing around the network faster and saves on energy because the signals aren’t converted.

Obviously, as interconnect technologies such as Intel’s Light Peak and all-optical chips advance, the future computing and web world will be based on light as opposed to circuits, but that’s further out than I’m willing to go here. For now, the rise of fiber is occurring in the ground and will soon reach the switches inside data centers.

Fiber will also play a role in wired broadband for municipalities. Last week, the FCC issued a National Broadband Map that showed how lacking many hospitals, schools and libraries are in the U.S., with two-thirds of schools not having access to 25 Mbps or higher connections. Joe Freddoso, president and CEO of the North Carolina MCNC, a non-profit fiber network serving universities, told me demand at universities increases by up to 20 percent a year. Right now, his network “is barely scratching the surface” of its 40 Gbps capacity, but he estimates that by the end of this decade, the network will need 200 Gbps capacity.

The Mobile Ecosystem: Fiber on the Run

Wired communities aren’t the only consumer demand driving faster fiber (also known as more wavelengths). Mobile operators are seeking faster backhaul to support their 4G networks. Two weeks ago, I talked to Stefaan Vanhastel, director of product marketing from Alcatel-Lucent, who said the company’s 10 Gbps technology is aimed more at mobile operators than residential consumers. That makes sense given that LTE networks of today are seeking to provide speeds of up to 12 Gbps, while those of tomorrow may provide 10 times that amount. Once a bunch of individuals at a cell site are sharing those speeds, the pipe taking the traffic back to the larger web has to grow as well. From a DB research note issued this morning:

Carriers are looking to pull fiber to all of their base stations, and 1GB systems may not be sufficient. This is good news for Ciena who remains in the lead for supplying 100GB and OTN systems. More 1GB and above base stations means more traffic and this should be lead to solid demand for Cisco’s and Juniper’s carrier business.

Indeed, Cisco’s ASR-9000 router, introduced in 2009 to deliver terabytes of capacity at the edge, has seen a lot of success despite naysayers questioning the need for that much bandwidth. This latest fiber build out is showing how we’re taking advantage of connectivity to improve our products and our lives. As a platform for innovation we still have a long way to go with broadband and we’re going to need a lot more bandwidth to do it.

Paul Glist from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, who has been representing cable companies in their filings with the FCC, countered by questioning TiVo’s business model and platform design. “Consumers don’t want to be buying devices,” he said, adding that it was TiVo’s own decision not to support tru2way.

Zinn was more than happy to toss the ball back into big cable’s court. “Tru2way for retail is dead,” he said, arguing that a variety of different implementations, an inflexible user interface and the lack of a nationwide rollout would make it impossible to make money with selling tru2way-enabled devices directly to customers. Zinn also reminded his audience that tru2way wasn’t the only cable technology that didn’t live up to its promise of promoting interoperability. “Every day in America consumers are denied cable cards,” he said, explaining that TiVo receives cable card horror stories almost on a daily basis from its users.

Malachy Moynihan, VP of engineering at Cisco, tried to remind both sides that consumers are increasingly looking elsewhere while the industry is fighting about cable regulation. “The world is changing, and people are spending more time on other media,” he said, proposing that both content providers and device makers need to look at offering consumers choice to access content across different platforms. “We probably face some of the same risks that the music industry faced,” he mused,
“and we are not going to solve this by building better protection.”

Zinn and Gilst actually managed to find common ground on TV Everywhere. Zinn said that TiVo would love to include TV Everywhere content on its new TiVo Premiere devices. TV Everywhere should be available just like Netflix is available,” he said. Gilst said that TV Everywhere is designed to run on a lot of hardware devices. “We’re probably not so far away on that,” he agreed, but added that it didn’t need regulation to make this happen.

Today’s debate was largely a response to the FCC’s recent inquiry into the cable innovation. TiVo had used its filing late last year to blame cable companies for the lack of innovation in the set-top box space and demand more regulation to open up two-way services. TiVo’s position got support from a separate filing from Public Knowledge, whose staff attorney John Bergmayer reminded us today that cable companies used to be on the other side of this debate not too long ago. “We believe innovation comes from outsiders,” he explained, adding: Cable used to be an outsider that the broadcasters tried to sue out of business.”

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