Beyond 10 GbE – Looking Ahead

Qwest Communications International
Mark Stine, CTO
Government Services Division
February 2005

Some of the Panel’s Questions
What problem are we trying to solve ?
How does price/technology/demand determine next step beyond 10 Gbps ?
Where are we now ?
40 Gbps/ OC-768 or 100 Gbps ?

What problem are we trying to solve? For Qwest
any new technology must result in:
Revenue improvement
Enable new services
Product line consolidation
Increase market coverage; provide services faster
Manage disruption of legacy revenue
Cost reduction
Increase utilization
Reduce ports; minimize metallic interfaces
Increase power efficiency and equipment density
Minimize revisits to equipment
Remote operation
Operations simplification
Convergence, integration of networks
Ease provisioning, network configuration changes
Improve inventory management
Reduce engineering and planning complexity
Business goals driven by
– demand, capital, competition, relationships

Qwest Multi-service, Packet Centric Infrastructure

How does 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps help?
More efficient aggregation of traffic
Today’s large metro, West coast and East coast  routes have  sufficient demand to support higher TDM rates beyond 10 Gbps
Traditionally higher TDM rate easier to manage than DWDM
Minimizes or eliminates WDM channels
Could be fairly significant in the metro environment as cost avoidance to deploying a metro DWDM system
Reduces the number of customer interfaces to manage
Cheaper – 40 Gbps getting closer
Higher TDM rate interface cards typically prove in at 2.5 times the cost for 4.0 times the bandwidth.  For example, 10 Gbps proved in at 2.5 times the cost of 2.5 Gbps
Solves customer application ???

Where are we today ?  Qwest has demonstrated the  largest  known 10G/40G BW * D Field Trial
Critical achievements:
ULH DWDM propagation of 85+  10 Gbps channels at >3000 km with mixed span lengths on Qwest TWC fiber
3x40Gbps and 88x10Gbps propagated over 1516 km

40G Trial Configuration:1516km

Where are we going?  Key Trends in Transport
Metro Optical Networking –
Large scale EXC/MSPP with optical interfaces
160Gbps-1.28Tbps capacity
OC-3c – OC-768(c)
VCAT combined with L2 capabilities
Metro Optical Ethernet –
Carrier grade L2 devices
Options for MPLS or VLAN traffic management/organization
Ethernet over dark fiber and over DWDM
Fast-E through 10G LAN PHY
Long Haul Optical Transport
Expansion of Ethernet in carrier transport space – Ethernet aggregation
Agile optical switching (OXCs, ROADMs)
Integrated 10G and 40G DWDM systems
Tunable and integrated optics
Optical control plane: GMPLS
G.709 digital wrappers
Ultra FEC
Raman amplification options

Key Disruptive Optical Trends to Watch
Optical component consolidation
Price disruption may drive optical architectures around these optical components.
Coherent modulation
May help enable 40 and 100 Gbps bit rates with lower symbol rates
Debate over opaque (digital) and transparent (analog) architectures
Depends on the network physical topology, demand set, applications, etc.
Some elements of both architectures will be optimal

Optical component consolidation
For the last 10 yrs we have been reducing the number of lasers in an optical transport network to reduce cost
Ultra Long Haul transponders/modulators, FEC, Raman  to improve reach and reduce regeneration
Transparency to reduce through traffic regeneration
What if the costs of lasers and optical components became cheap?  Different paradigm. Very disruptive.
Consolidation of multiple discrete optical components onto silicon
Chip yields in full production environment??

Coherent Modulation -  Radio Communications 101
Today’s optical transport equipment uses OOK modulation
Some version of NRZ, RZ, & CS-RZ  formats
Future coherent modulation is disruptive in the long haul
QPSK, PSK, dQPSK, dPSK, QAM, etc
Offers up to a theoretical gain of 3 dB OSNR over OOK
More complex receiver design
Appears to be more tolerant to some nonlinear effects, chromatic dispersion and PMD

Optical Networking Choices

40 Gbps - Challenges and Answers
Fiber
PMD on older single mode fiber
Costs
Not quite there

100 Gbps - Challenges and Answers
Fiber
PMD serious problem on today’s fiber, requires PMD compensators
Dispersion managed fiber likely required and active dispersion compensators
Component and material limitations
Transmitter/Receivers – near electro-optics limits, may require OTDM vs ETDM
Lasers – very narrow, high repetition pulse rate with low jitter
Processors – processing at line rate challenging (limits FEC, for example)
System concerns
Channel spacing fairly wide to avoid FWM
OSNR challenged for current long haul amplifier spacing
Nonlinear effects: SPM, XPM

Thank You!