Comcast Conducts 100G Live Trial with Nortel

Comcast will conduct a test of Nortel's 100 Gbps line rate optical transmission solution at the 71st meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference, which it is hosting this week in Philadelphia.


The 100G solution runs over Comcast's existing fiber network. The test network is comprised of Comcast's existing Common Photonic Layer DWDM solution with 50GHz enhanced Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (eROADM) and photonic components, augmented with prototype 100G interfaces installed in Nortel's Optical Multiservice Edge 6500. The 100G cards utilize Nortel's 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine, with integrated dispersion compensation and dual-polarization Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) modulation, the same technology used in Nortel's present 40G solution. The 100G trial runs from Philadelphia to McLean (Virginia), traversing Comcast's metro and long-haul fibers.


The companies said Comcast's network trial will be first time real traffic is run over a 100G wavelength on its existing network. The network also carrying live 10G and 40G links. The trial will run in parallel over the same optical infrastructure that supports a combination of high definition or HD video, Internet and voice traffic on Comcast's 40G national backbone network.


"Testing an interoperable multi-vendor 100G solution will help provide us with important information about how new solutions will support a next generation of high bandwidth services for the digital generation of consumers," said John Schanz, EVP National Engineering and Technical Operations for Comcast.http://www.nortel.comhttp://www.comcast.com