The decision to deploy a 100Gbit/s system, rather than multiple 10Gbit/s systems or a 40Gbit/s system, was based on the economics of serving the anticipated traffic on this link, and the availability of Nortel gear to do the upgrade, says Stuart Elby, Verizon's VP of network architecture and enterprise technology.
"That particular route between Paris and Frankfurt has tens of gigabits on that fiber, and we were looking at having to throw many more 10G systems onto it," says Elby. "The maturity of 100Gbit/s is there -- we are using Nortel, and they have a 100Gbit/s system that is generally available. We looked at the business case and it was less costly to add 100Gbit/s than 10 or 15 10Gbit/s systems."
Nortel was chosen by Verizon for its European optical upgrade in November 2007. (See Nortel Takes 40-Gig to Verizon.)
Verizon was able to add the 100Gbit/s signal to a single channel, using the same spacing between wavelengths that is used today.
