Ciena: Latin American carriers primed for 100 Gbps transport

Ciena unveiled WaveLogic 3 at the OFC/NFOEC 2012 fiber optic industry conference in Los Angeles last week, stressing that the solution is scalable to 400 Gbps, as well as incorporating software that allows carriers to easily adjust to the balance between capacity, reach and latency in tandem with changing circumstances or needs.

WaveLogic 3 has existed in prototype format for roughly a year, and it will go commercial in 2H12, but customers like BT in the UK, trans-Pacific subsea cable operator Southern Cross and PWWC in Asia committed to it even before the OFC/NFOEC show. And Latin American operators are no different when it comes to exploding capacity needs.

"We have many customers with big needs for this kind of technology. We will most likely be trying with more than one of them this year," Ciena's CALA region general manager and sales VP, Fabio Medina, told BNamericas.

In fact, Embratel in Brazil has already set the precedent for large capacity networks, announcing last week an upgrade that gave its optical transport network (OTN) a switching capacity of 3.6 Tbps, scalable to 120 Tbps. Medina pointed out that terabit switching capacity has been available from Ciena for some time now, and that it will become more popular as transport systems increase transmission speeds to 400 Gbps.

Ciena has proved WaveLogic 3's 400 Gbps capability in the lab, and it will be testing this with customers this year. But additional software upgrades will be required before it can be offered as a product, Medina says.

Rivals like Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) also announced 400G roadmaps at the OFC/NFOEC event, also based on coherent technology. But at last week's launch event, Ciena CTO Steve Alexander said the main differentiator in favor of WaveLogic 3 is the intelligence built into the governing software, which is what allows the adjustable capacity, reach and latency.

Medina added that Ciena has the advantage of making its own chips, which means the design of both the chips and the software can be fine-tuned for optimal results.

On one hand, WaveLogic 3 eliminates the need for other optimization technologies because it has an integrated test-set that monitors network performance. But on the other hand, this capability can complement existing solutions by providing additional visibility of network issues, helping service providers to understand the network better.

"There will be solutions that are still useful on top of [WaveLogic], but I think we have all the elements that a service provider needs to make sure services are performing to the level they're committed to," Medina said.

Ciena described the chip's power as equivalent to simultaneously carrying Skype video chats from San Francisco's some 345,000 households to Tokyo through a single chip, whereas 10G and 40G systems would need whole racks to handle this throughput.