Operators want to cut power by a fifth by 2020

Briefing: Green ICT

Part 2: Operators’ power efficiency strategies

Service providers have set themselves ambitious targets to reduce their energy consumption by a fifth by 2020. This despite the expected traffic they will carry being thirty times today’s volumes. Given the cost of electricity and operators’ requirements, such targets are not surprising: KPN, with its 12,000 sites in The Netherlands, consumes 1% of the country’s electricity.

 

“We also have to invest in capital expenditure for a big swap of equipment – in mobile and DSLAMs"

Philippe Tuzzolino, France Telecom-Orange

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AT&T domain suppliers

Date	Domain	Partners
Sept 2009	Wireline Access	Ericsson
Feb 2010	Radio Access Network	Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson
April 2010	Optical and transport equipment	Ciena
July 2010	IP/MPLS/Ethernet/Evolved Packet Core	Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper, Cisco

The table shows the selected players in AT&T's domain supplier programme announced to date.

AT&T has stated that there will likely be eight domain supplier categories overall so four more have still to be detailed.

Looking at the list, several thoughts arise:

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40 and 100Gbps: Growth assured yet uncertainty remains

Briefing: High-speed optical transmission.

Part 2: 40 and 100Gbps optical transmission

The market for 40 and 100 Gigabit-per-second optical transmission is set to grow over the next five years at a rate unmatched by any other optical networking segment.  Such growth may excite the industry but vendors have tough decisions to make as to how best to pursue the opportunity.

Market research firm Ovum forecasts that the wide area network (WAN) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) market for 40 and 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) linecards will have a 79% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) till 2014.

In turn, 40 and 100Gbps transponder volumes will grow even faster, at 100% CAGR till 2015, while revenues from 40 and 100Gbps transponder sale will have a 65% CAGR during the same period.

Yet with such rude growth comes uncertainty.

“We upgraded to 40Gbps because we believe – we are certain, in fact – that across the router and backbone it [40Gbps technology] is cheaper”

Jim King, AT&T Labs.

Systems, transponder and component vendors all have to decide what next-generation modulation schemes to pursue for 40Gbps to complement the now established differential phase-shift keying (DPSK). There are also questions regarding the cost of the different modulation options, while vendors must assess what impact 100Gbps will have on the 40Gbps market and when the 100Gbps market will take off.  

“What is clear to us is how muddled the picture is,” says Matt Traverso, senior manager, technical marketing at Opnext.

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Opnext's multiplexer IC plays its part in 100Gbps trial

AT&T’s 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) coherent trial between Louisiana and Florida detailed earlier this week was notable for several reasons. It included a mix of 10, 40 and 100Gbps wavelengths, Cisco Systems' newest IP core router, the CRS-3, and a 100Gbps line-side design from Opnext.

 

According to Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst of optical at Infonetics Research, what is significant about the 100Gbps AT&T trial is the real-time transmission; unlike previous 100Gbps trials no received data was block-captured and decoded offline.

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OFC/NFOEC 2010: Technical paper highlights

At this year’s OFC/NFOEC, to be held on March 21-25, all the main themes driving optical networking are represented:  40 and 100Gbps transmission, coherent detection, photonic integration, and the latest in optical access such as WDM-PON.

Here is a sample of some of the noteworthy papers.

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Framing the information age

Maurice Broomfield is a 94-year-old photographer who has documented examples of 20th century industry. His lifelong work is about to be shown at two exhibitions in the UK, as detailed in an interview with the Financial Times. It made me wonder whether anyone is doing the equivalent for telecom and datacom? Mega data centres as IT cathedrals?

When writing features for FibreSystems Europe, I repeatedly asked for high-resolution striking images. The magazine's editors always wanted photos that included people, like Maurice Broomfield's photos.  Getting hold of such images did happen but not often.

Inspired by the Financial Times’ interview and Maurice Broomfield's beautiful images, some of the better images sent are presented here.

IBM data centre

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AT&T rethinks its relationship with networking vendors

Does AT&T's Domain Supplier programme mark a nod to the past when carriers were vertically integrated?

 “We’ll go with only two players [per domain] and there will be a lot more collaboration.”

 Tim Harden, AT&T

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