By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Two Japanese groups demonstrated Thursday night at the OFC/NFOEC 2011 postdeadline paper sessions that they can send more than 100 terabits per second (Tbps) through one hair-thin optical fiber.

Qian et al. from NEC Laboratories America reached 101.7 Tbps over standard single-mode fiber using pilot-based phase noise mitigation. The team sent 370 wavelengths each with data rates of 294 Gbps over 165 km of standard single-mode fiber to achieve the results. The team said it achieved spectral efficiency of 11 bits/s/Hz, which it considered the highest reported spectral efficiency to date for wavelength-division multiplexing transmission.

A separate team, Sakaguchi et al. from Sumitomo Electric Industries in Japan, demonstrated 109 Tbps using spatial division multiplexed signals over a seven-core fiber. The Sumitomo group sent 97 colors through each of the cores at data rates of 172 Gbps (two 86 Gbps QPSK signals). The team sent the data over 16.8 km of fiber.

The 34 postdeadline papers came from a variety of sources, including Oracle Labs, IBM, NEC Labs America, Hewlett-Packard, ZTE, the University of Southampton, the Technical University of Denmark, the Heinrich Hertz Institute, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, TE Subcom, Sumitomo Electric Industries, the University of Melbourne, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of California-San Diego, the Technical University of Berlin, Infinera, Alcatel-Lucent, the Technical University of Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Nokia-Siemens Networks and NTT Photonics Labs.  

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.

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By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

Andrew Bach, keynote speaker for the Service Provider Summit at OFC/NFOEC Wednesday morning, presented the daunting challenge the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is facing--having to transmit millions of trades in microsecond timeframes.

Bach painted the picture of an ever-growing network demanding the newest communications technologies for the Exchange to simply keep up with the ballooning number of trades at real-time speeds. “A delay of five or six microseconds could cost several hundred thousand dollars,” he noted.

Bach made it clear that the NYSE is living in a terabit world. “Get me one terabit pipes, please,” said Bach. The Exchange currently uses 2.5 Tbps and the demand for more is going up quickly, said Bach.

What are the volume levels like? There are between 100,000 and 400,000 messages delivered every second on the NYSE itself. By the end of the decade, Bach said the exchange expects to grow to 10 million messages every second.

Whatever delay there does seem to be is related to the need for the exchange to store the information in its New Jersey data center, according to Bach. This is critical for investigations that might come in the future.

The NYSE is “now a heavy consumer of dark fiber; we are lighting it ourselves,” says Bach. An important advance has been the Exchange's ability to operate the data center remotely, a condition that was necessary recently as the result of blizzards in the area did not allow people to be physically present at the center as markets stayed open.

The Exchange currently uses 6,000 routers and switches, 200,000 1Gbps ports or below, and 10,000 10 Gbps ports, according to Bach.

What are the challenges? “As the bandwidth keeps going up and up, the jitter has to be brought down to near zero if not zero,” according to Bach. “We have far too many switches waiting in case something breaks. If I cant start putting in one terabit links, it's just not worth it.”

Likewise, latency needs to keep becoming less of a factor. It is one reason why the data are not encrypted for security purposes. However, as Bach points out, the data are no longer of use after a second or two anyway as they become stale after the newest trade.

Something else on Bach's wish list? Hollow core fibers, which he believes will also speed trades.

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.

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By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

“We are on the way to the gigabit society,” said OFC/NFOEC 2011 keynote speaker Bruno Orth Tuesday morning at the plenary session. Orth defines the gigabit society as a mobile broadband photonic network that is all IP. “The price for WDM has gone down tremendously over the past decade,” said Orth. Router performance is much better than Moore's law would estimate.

New networking models are needed to deal with the economics of fiber to the home, Orth said. “The first 20 percent of those receiving it are not the problem,” he observed. “The last 20 percent account for up to 50 percent of the networking cost. Therefore, we need a new model for FTTH infrastructure”

A helpful exercise for service providers that is used at Deutsche Telekom is to assume that all your customers use smart phones, or that all your customers had their full content in the cloud, or that they all used VOIP and roamed freely, according to Orth. He raised the growing fear that many have that smart phones have the potential to stress or even crash the network.

“We are engaged in optics in a way we have never been before,” said Alan Gara, IBM Fellow and Blue Gene Chief Architect. “All interconnects in the new IBM supercomputers will be optical by 2018,” according to Gara. “Without optics we will not be able to continue to build systems,” he continued. “The optical boundary will continue to move in.” The only way IBM will be able to achieve its next gen supercomputing goals will be through optics, he said.

Kristin Rinne of AT&Labs said there has been an 8,000 percent increase in mobile broadband traffic over the last four years, noting that the application behind much of the growth is video. “There is an awfully lot of wireline in the wireless network,” said Rinne, who quoted Dell'Oro report numbers which say that $8 billion will be spent on fiber and microwave mobile backhaul upgrades in the next five years.

Congratulations to the following winners acknowledged at the plenary session: Constance Chang-Hasnain (David Sarnoff award),  David Welch (Tyndall Award), the following OSA fellows: Young-Kai Chen (Bell Labs), Charles Cox (Photonic Systems), Michael Eiselt (ADVA Optical), Nicholas Frigo (U.S. Naval Academy), Jonathan Knight ( University of Bath), Ashok Krishmamoorthy (Oracle Labs), Xiang Liu (Bell Labs), William Shieh (University of Melbourne), and Lakshmin Tamil (University of Texas).  IEEE Communications Society fellows include: Debabani Choudhury (Intel), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics), Jawadand Salehi (Sharif University of Technology) and Jane Simmons (Monarch Network Architects). IEEE Photonic Society fellows include Douglas Baney (Agilent Technologies), Jin-Xing Cai (Tyco), Nareseh Chand (BAE Systems), Frederick Kish (Infinera), Paul Morton (Morton Photonics, again), Rodney Waterhouse (Pharad), and Alice White (Alcatel-Lucent).

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.

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By C. David Chaffee, Chaffee Fiber Optics

The first keynote speaker at OSA's Executive Forum 2011, Basil Alwan, set an optimistic tone for both the Forum and OFC/NFOEC 2011, observing that the optical transport industry now is “really breathtaking.” He even went so far as to say “it is an honor to be associated with this industry at this time.”  Alwan is president of the IP Division and Head of Portfolio Strategy for the Networks Groups.

What's so exciting? Well, for one thing the size of the network continues to grow as does the number of its endpoints, Alwan told a crowded Marriott conference room Monday morning. Caching also is a high growth storage application Alwan is excited about. “We are thrilled with the progress in 100 G,” he continued, “we are really pulling the rabbit out of the hat with 100 G.”

Alwan went on to say that 400 G is “achievable and practical,” and that a terabit “will be necessary.”

Perhaps giving insights into what Alcatel-Lucent's optical research involvement will be going forward, Alwan said “it is not an option to leave anything on the table any more. We can't ignore any options. Each one may be a silver bullet.”

In the first panel following Alwan's talk, Verizon's Glenn Wellbrock agreed with Alwan's assessment of the coming need for 100 G. The popular Wellbrock, who is speaking on some six panels this week, said optical transport routes between New York and Chicago, “deserve 100 G, probably several 100 G lines.”

A question that dominated the panel was how rapidly the network operator should move to IP optical using packet transport. While Google was seen as having the newer, next gen network, Wellbrock observed that any Google search or phone call is going through a Verizon or AT&T network at some point.

And Google Senior Network Architect Bikash Koley, also a member of the first panel, was deferential, observing that, “I think everyone would agree that we are moving to packet-based services.”

However, Koley also noted that “the biggest challenge for us is that a lot of the optical transport equipment that has been designed we don't need.” He acknowledged that “the way to overcome this” is for manufacturers to know what Google needs.

When we caught up with him afterwards, Koley said his comments related to the larger Google core optical transport network, not the 1 Gbps to the residence network the company has promised to bring to one or more communities. However, he did say Google was 'surprised” by the high number of vendors that responded to the 1 Gbps to the home solicitation once it was offered.

C. David Chaffee (cdcfiber@aol.com) owns Chaffee Fiber Optics, a Baltimore-based firm that specializes in analyzing developments in fiber optics and publishing on the state of the industry.  

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