The previous posts in this series sketched out how the route from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and beyond approaches the theoretical capacity limit of a DWDM channel. Any system operated at the edge of the envelope tends to fail spectacularly, and high channel capacity optics are no exception. Lower bit rate transceivers had a narrow range [...]
The previous posts in this series outlined how coherent optics stretch the capacity of existing 10 Gbps DWDM systems to 100 Gbps per channel without major surgery on the fiber network. But that is probably as much as commonly deployed 50 GHz channel DWDM systems will carry, at least over any meaningful distance on existing [...]
Last post, I reviewed how coherent optics allowed 40 Gbps waves to be dropped into existing 10 Gbps DWDM systems without major modifications. That was good news for network operators who had a much more difficult upgrade path from 2.5 to 10 Gbps. There’s more good news: the optical magicians have pulled another rabbit out of [...]
As the need for speed took fiber optic transmission beyond 10 Gbps per channel, long-range optical transponders have moved beyond the Morse code-like on-off keying (OOK) used in fiber optic communications for decades. More sophisticated modulation and demodulation schemes are commonly used in modern wireless equipment where radio frequency bandwidth is scarce, but had not [...]
Encrypting data to protect it from prying eyes is nothing new, and U.S. Government encryption protocols like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) have become de facto standards. But the encryption task was typically handled in individual applications, or by firewalls and routers that operate above layer-1 of the ISO OSI stack. The throughput of these [...]
Precise timing has many applications in telecommunications. But the precision of commercial systems is typically limited by the precision of a vibrating quartz crystal—a tiny chunk of rock. More precise atomic clocks using the natural frequency of individual atoms have been confined to laboratories and special applications because of their cost, size, and power consumption. [...]
Networking gear is trending away from custom ASICs to merchant silicon, and the newest generation of these switching chips has crossed the terabit per second threshold. A single chip can now switch 64 full-duplex 10 Gbps wire-speed flows without blocking, for a total of 1.28 Tbps, or just under one billion packets per second. Switch [...]
Our team is excited to launch our website and officially present Metro|NS to the telco community. As many of you know, it’s been a busy and fantastic few months. After the sale of Lexent, our team regrouped (took some time to unwind) and came back refreshed and ready to tackle our next project, Metro Network [...]
