Nortel Buzzboard

This morning Verizon issued this press release highlighting the recent completion of a live field trial of 100 gig optical technology using Nortel equipment.  Using Nortel’s 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine cards on the Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500, Verizon transported data error-free at a rate of 92 Gbps over a 73 kilometer stretch of fiber in northeastern Texas.

The critical finding in the trial was that the network demonstrated twice the tolerance for signal distortion when compared with today’s standard 10G signal.  This is quite a feat, as fiber distortion (also called polarization mode dispersion or PMD) increases by a factor of 4 and 10 when transmission rates are upped from 10G to 40G or 100G respectively.

PMD is a challenge for operators because it can distort traffic and cripple networks by making it impossible to send traffic across fiber links at high speed.  In this field trail, “high loss” fiber was used to test the advanced signal-processing method and signal-correcting techniques embedded in Nortel’s technology.

The Verizon release called the accomplishment “a significant next step toward the commercialization of 100G transmission.”