ADVA Optical Networking announced today that the company is heading a group of university and enterprise partners in developing standards-based, carrier-class metropolitan Ethernet transport networks that cost-effectively deliver data transport speeds of 100 Gigabits per second (100Gbit/s). One of four in the “100GET” (GET=Gigabit Ethernet Transport) innovation initiative that is scheduled to continue until 2010 and receive total public and private investment of more than EUR 200 million is the metro-focused group.
To develop a 100Gbit/s muxponder prototype for the metro area is the primary goal of the project. To enable a 100Gbit/s demonstrator at Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute (www.hhi.fraunhofer.de), as well as in the OCTET (Open Environment for Advanced Carrier Ethernet Technologies) field testbed from Deutsche Telekom, further plans call for ADVA Optical Networking’s systems, and additional field trials are also planned.
With the participation of ADVA Optical Networking and about 30 other companies, research organizations and universities, Government agencies in Finland, France, Germany and Sweden are helping fund 100GET, which launched in 2007. Defining a complete, system-integrated telecommunications solution for transmitting high-quality, 100Gbit/s services at lowest cost—and, ultimately, driving associated standards through organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union—Standardization (ITU-T), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) are some of the goals. A test bed open to European suppliers will be created by the 100GET collaborators.
Ongoing growth in bandwidth-hungry services such as storage, telemedicine, grid computing, e-commerce and video-based consumer broadband continues to expand capacity requirements across global networks. According to CELTIC, the European research-and-development consortium that is orchestrating 100GET, Global Internet traffic grew by 57 percent between mid 2006 and mid 2007. Network operators, consequently, are preparing their optical infrastructures to scale beyond today’s 10Gbit/s and 40Gbit/s capabilities.
