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PacketLight Networks says it now offers the first standards-based, 1RU 100G muxponder/transponder for metro and long-haul applications. The OIF-compliant PL-1000GM/GT aggregates multirate and multiprotocol 10G and 40G services into a 100G OTU4 uplink trunk.

PacketLight offers two 100-Gbps variants:

    A 100G muxponder for metro networks that reach up to 480 km.
    A 100G muxponder/transponder that can reach up to 2,500 km for ultra-long-haul networks.

Both configurations offer multirate transport capability and a smooth transition from 10G/40G to 100G client interfaces, PacketLight says. Both also can operate over existing 10G networks.
 
PacketLight integrates up to two optical amplifiers, mux/demux, and dispersion compensation modules if needed in the same 1U chassis. The PL-1000GM/GT integrates with PacketLight’s PL-2000 and PL-1000TN.

PL-1000GM/GT offers GFEC for standards-based G.709 100G forward error correction (FEC). Additionally, PL-1000GM/GT can be managed remotely via either in-band or out-of-band optical supervisory channel (OSC).

The new product benefits from PacketLight’s Web-based management tool and LightWatch NMS/EMS systems.

"100G technology has reached the maturity level where it has been standardized by the optical community. Therefore, today’s standards-based optical infrastructure offers no limitations and overcomes the interoperability issues,” stated Koby Reshef, PacketLight’s CEO. “At PacketLight, we identified two market segments which will adopt the 100G technology: metro networks and carrier long-haul. These segments have different requirements and challenges. We built solutions addressing both of the segment needs within the same footprint and under common NMS platform."

Author Stephen Hardy
Editorial Director and Associate Publisher

Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) reported revenue of $477.6 million for the second quarter of its fiscal 2012, ended April 30. And corporate management said they expect continued strength in the second half of the year.

Despite the strong revenue performance, the company still lost $27.8 million ($0.28 per common share) in the quarter on a GAAP basis. Still, Ciena’s performance showed marked improvement over the same quarter in 2011, when the company reported a GAAP net loss of $62.7 million ($0.66 per common share).

On a non-GAAP, basis, the company made $3.7 million ($0.04 per common share) during this year’s second quarter.

Gross margin declined sequentially during the quarter, to 38.3%, from 40.3% in 1Q12. The company blamed product mix and the delivery of new systems to new customers for the slippage.

Packet-optic transport system sales led the revenue charge, growing $51.7 million sequentially. Revenues from the CESD and services segments also rose sequentially. Together, these niches offset a sequential decline in sales of packet-optical switching systems such as the CoreDirector and the relatively new 5400 Reconfigurable Switching System.

As has become a common lament, CEO Gary Smith noted that economic turmoil in Europe continues to have an effect on equipment demand. However, he noted that the company has limited exposure to Southern Europe, where the region’s economic problems are most pronounced. He described demand from Ciena’s Northern European customers as “steady” during a conference call with analysts.

Smith and Senior Vice President, Finance and CFO James Moylan said they expect revenues for the current quarter, which ends July 31, to range between $455 million and $485 million. They also expressed confidence that the second half of the year will prove positive for the company, including for the currently lagging switching business. Smith says that the company has 19 customers (counting the 16-member SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium as a single customer) for the 5400 switching platforms, which the company unveiled in September 2009. As a point of comparison, Smith pointed out on the call that this number is already 50% that of the 12-year-old CoreDirector, the 5400’s predecessor.

[Correction] In addition to several Tier 1 customers among the SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium, Verizon has announced its plans to deploy the 5430 in its network (see “Verizon unveils new optical network strategy”) [Editor's Note: Lightwave had previously reported that Ciena had no Tier 1 deployments yet, which was an error.]

Ciena also has seen success with its WaveLogic processor-enabled coherent transport offerings. Vice President of Investor Relations Greg Lampf said that the company has 114 customers using its coherent technology. Interestingly, about 105 of them are using coherent technology to support 40-Gbps data rates. About 30 customers are transmitting 100-Gbps wavelengths. A number of customers are doing both, which explains why the total customer number is 114 and not 135.

VI Systems GmbH has introduced the T25-850 transmitter optical subassembly (TOSA) and the R25-850 receiver optical subassembly (ROSA) for data rates of up to 28 Gbps.

The receiver includes a PIN photodetector within a spectral range of 700-890 nm and a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) in a high frequency TO-style micropackage. The transmitter combines VI Systems’ ultra-high-speed 850-nm VCSEL and driver IC.

The transmitter and receiver TO-style package is coupled with a 50-micron multimode fiber. The dimensions of the assemblies are below 6 mm in diameter, which matches SFP transceivers. The overall length, including a plastic boot for strain relief of the optical fiber, is 40 mm. Complementary high-frequency test boards are available.

The T25-850 transmitter is specified to operate over a temperature range from 0 to +85 degree C. The supply voltage is 3.3 V. The TOSA features a power consumption of 130 mW.

The R25-850 receiver supply voltage is +3.3 V. It features a power consumption of 110 mW. The ROSA includes a VIS photodetector chip in combination with the latest generation of transimpedance amplifier chip from VI Systems to ensure maximum performance at low power consumption.

Target applications include short-reach optical transceiver modules used in Storage Area Networks and in the computer industry. The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) defined the first interfaces to operate at data rates of 25 and 28 Gbps. Further standards for serial transmission at ultra-high-speed data rates of 26-56 Gbps are currently being developed within Fibre Channel FC32, the OIF, and the Ethernet IEEE 40/100 Gbps and the Infiniband EDR standards bodies.

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext and NYSE: ALU) has taken the wraps off its entry in the large-scale core router market. The 7950 XRS (Extensible Routing System) family, based on the company’s highly touted FP3 400-Gbps chipset, offers 32-Tbps capacity and 160 ports of 100-Gigabit Ethernet in the top of the line incarnation, the 7950 XRS-40.

The 7950 XRS family has three members:

    The 7950 XRS-40, which in addition to the capacity figures mentioned above is designed to accommodate up to 2 terabits per slot. It can be upgraded to multi-chassis configurations to ensure continued growth as needed. It will be available in the first half of 2013.
    The 7950 XRS-20 is a 16-Tbps core router with support for eighty 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces in a single rack, which Alcatel-Lucent asserts is 5X more than the current norm. It can be upgraded to a 7950 XRS-40 and/or multi-chassis configuration, and also will accommodate up to 2 terabits per slot. It will be available in the third quarter of 2012 and is currently in several trials.
    The 7950 XRS-16c is a 6.4-Tbps core router, aimed at smaller points of presence (POPs)/nodes requiring maximum agility. It sports up to thirty-two 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and is designed to accommodate 1 terabit per slot. It will be available in the first half of 2013.

In addition to high capacity, the 7950 XRS line is designed to offer cost-effective operation. The platforms offer power savings of more than 66 percent versus typical core routers, the company asserts. The company is positioning the family at both IP backbone networks as well as regional and metro core networks.

The 7950 XRS line also plays into Alcatel-Lucent’s IP/optical convergence strategy via the following features:

    support for transponder integration into the 7950 XRS at 10G, 40G, and 100G speeds
    efficient grooming of traffic from the IP layer into the optical transport network
    common management with the 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM) platform
    an Optical Extension Shelf capability that integrates the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) with the 7950 XRS.

Alcatel-Lucent emphasizes that the new routers are built to scale. The 7950 XRS backplane and optical interconnect are designed to handle slot capacities of 2 Tbps, multi-chassis clustering that enables the system to scale up to 240 Tbps in the future, as well as support 400 Gigabit Ethernet and 1-Tbps interfaces as they become available.

The 7950 XRS routers will leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s existing Service Router Operating System (SR OS).

The company rounded up several endorsements for the 750 XRS launch.

“Verizon is experiencing tremendous growth in metro Ethernet services. Platforms such as the Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS will help us efficiently scale to support higher speeds and new capabilities while offering efficiency and flexibility,” said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of global IP and transport planning and technology, Verizon. “We applaud Alcatel-Lucent for its bold approach to router value and performance.”

“The success of our broadband services worldwide is resulting in rapid traffic growth in our IP network. As we carry more traffic, we have to improve the power and space efficiency of our network infrastructure” said Fumio Ito, vice president, network services technology of NTT Communications. “We are pleased to see innovation from Alcatel-Lucent that brings enhancements to the IP network in terms that might be able to address our operational challenges and costs.”

“BT is constantly improving our network to deliver new and better broadband services to our consumer and business customers” added Karl Penaluna, president, BT Global Networks and Systems. “We’ve been using Alcatel-Lucent’s 7750 Service Router for many years as part of the rollout of the 21CN program across the UK. As we deal with increasing traffic volumes and deliver the growth in cloud services from our data centers, we’ll need platforms for our national and metro core networks that scale to 100-Gigabit links and beyond. We’re also constantly seeking to reduce our physical footprint and power per bit, so we’re very encouraged to see Alcatel-Lucent meeting these challenges with the 7950 XRS.”

“Service providers face a serious problem as they tackle 100G, the next great inflection point in their routing, switching and optical networks. If they keep adding more of the same equipment to their networks, they will end up multiplying space and power requirements” said Michael Howard, principal analyst and co-founder, Infonetics Research. “Alcatel-Lucent’s new 7950 XRS core router platform appears to address the scaling of core networks without growing both soft and hard operating costs. We expect that service providers will also see direct benefits of the versatility of the 7950 XRS in core/metro/datacenter interconnect networks and include it in their decision process mix as they evaluate how to scale their 100G infrastructure.”