CenturyLink's 100 Gbps Backbone and Metro Upgrade

The ever advancing telecom network takes another leap forward at CenturyLink.

Pieter Poll, Senior Vice President of national and international network planning, engineering and construction for CenturyLink expects the carrier’s U.S. 100 Gbps wavelength service deployment, to be popular with large enterprise, government and wholesale customers. In addition, Poll said in an email to Telecompetitor, “We will use 100G waves for all our IP backbone growth going forward so even consumers benefit from our 100G introduction.”

The 100 Gbsp service uses, Coherent Optical Processors. Use of these processors involve a “fundamental change” in how data is sent over optical connections, Ciena Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Rick Dodd told Connected Planet. Instead of simply turning a light on and off as with traditional optical processing, coherent optical processing works “more like the wireless world—you can change the phase and amplitude,” Dodd said.

In comparison with the traditional approach, coherent optics can support higher bandwidth speeds, currently as high as 100 Gb/s, said Dodd. The technology also enables high-bandwidth communications to be supported over some types of fiber that would not otherwise support such high speeds, added Dodd.

Sources:
http://www.telecompetitor.com/centurylink-exec-details-100-gbps-backbone-and-metro-upgrade/

http://connectedplanetonline.com/IP-NGN/news/ciena-expands-use-of-coherent-optical-processing-0302/index.html