Nortel Buzzboard

Virgin Media is using Nortel and Juniper equipment to trial what is believed to be the first-ever 40 gig optical network in the United Kingdom. The 40G trial was conducted in April over a 350km (217 mile) span of Virgin Media’s current UK 10G network between Manchester and London. Here’s the news release.

Virgin Media already has Nortel and Juniper equipment in its network, with a nationwide 2500km Nortel CPL (Common Photonic Layer) optical network and Juniper T-series core routers. To enable the 40 gig trail, Nortel provided its 40G Adaptive Optical Engine DWDM transponder cards which interconnected with Juniper Networks T-series routers with 40G interfaces.

An interesting note on the trial is that the 40 gig traffic in the trial traveled the entire 350km span with absolutely no need for regeneration, external dispersion compensation or Raman amplification (which has a significant simplification and cost-savings benefit).

This trial comes on the heels of Nortel’s recent launch of our 40/100 gig optical solution, which I blogged about as a real reason to get excited.

Based in the UK, Virgin Media is the largest Virgin company in the world with almost 10 million customers. Virgin Media offers the UK’s only quad-play of TV, broadband, phone and mobile service. They are the UK’s largest residential broadband provider, and the second largest provider of pay TV and home phone services.