Nortel Offers Easy 40 Gbps Upgrades on 10 Gbps Cables

Nortel (News - Alert) Networks says it has a simple, affordable way to upgrade undersea bandwidth to 40 Gbps operation, from 10 Gbps, without any modification of the physical cable and its submarine components such as repeaters and power amplifiers.


The capability is important, as wide area network operators look to expand bandwidth in affordable ways, so end users can continue to buy higher amounts of bandwidth at affordable prices.

In the past month, Nortel has announced successful trials with Southern Cross and Reliance Globalcom (News - Alert). At Southern Cross, Nortel piped 40G traffic over a 4,200km link between California and Hawaii and on an 8,000km segment between Hawaii and Auckland, says CommsDay International.

Nortel also used the technique on a 12,000 km 40G connection over Reliance Globalcom’s FA-1 cable on a trans-Atlantic loop. That means a four-fold increase in capacity can be completed in weeks to months, without new cable construction.

According to Robert Hadaway, leader, MEN new business at Nortel, the solution will work on any subsea systems in the water today, including optical cables that do not alrady use dense wave division multiplexing.

The technology behind Nortel’s 40G solution is called Dual Polarisation Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP OPSK) and a coherent receiver, which Nortel says is a first in the industry. The receiver allows reuse of 10-Gbps components on a 40-Gbps transmission line.