A group of industry leaders have collaborated on a live demonstration of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) interoperability, showing the ability to pass 100GigE traffic between a router and optical transport system using two different CFP optical transceivers implementing the IEEE 802.3ba 100GBASE-LR4 draft standard. The demonstration marks a significant step towards commercial availability of 100 GigE services at economic cost levels.
The demonstration can be seen at the Infinera Express mobile display unit on the show floor at the OFC/NFOEC conference and exhibition which is scheduled to take place at the San Diego Convention Center.
The demonstration features a Juniper Networks’ T1600 Core Router and an Infinera DTN optical system exchanging 100 GigE traffic using 100 Gigabit per second CFP pluggable optical transceiver modules from Finisar and Opnext. The 100 GigE signals are generated by test sets supplied by Exfo and Ixia. The demonstration also includes Reflex Photonics’ 100GBASE-SR10 CFP modules.
Use of interoperable pluggable modules from these industry leaders marks an important step towards implementing the IEEE’s 802.3ba draft standard and the CFP Multi-Source Agreement (MSA). The availability and interoperability of pluggable CFP modules from multiple vendors will be key to driving economic price points and widespread deployment of 100 Gigabit Ethernet networking equipment such as routers, switches and optical transport gear. Service providers see an increasing need for 100 GigE networks as bandwidth demand continues to grow, driven by trends such as video and cloud computing
