Is network traffic growth dwindling to a trickle?

“Network capacities are sufficient, and with data usage expected to plateau in the coming years, further capacity expansion is not needed. We have reached the end of history for communications.”  

Willian Webb, The End of Telecoms History

William Webb has pedigree when it comes to foreseeing telecoms trends.  

William Webb

Webb wrote The 5G Myth in 2016, warning that 5G would be a flop.

In the book, he argued that the wireless standard's features would create limited interest and fail to grow revenues for mobile operators. 

The next seven years saw the telcos promoting 5G and its capabilities. Now, they admit their considerable investments in 5G have delivered underwhelming returns.

His latest book, The End of Telecoms History, argues that telecoms has reached a maturity that satisfies the link speeds needed and that traffic growth is slowing. 

"There will be no end of new applications," says Webb. "But they won't result in material growth in data requirements or in data speeds."  

Click to read more ...

Ciena builds its IP edge

Part II: IP Routing: Ciena's Vyatta acquisition 

Ciena’s acquisition of AT&T’s Vyatta team is a further step in its campaign to bolster its internet protocol (IP) expertise.

Ciena will gain 60 IP engineers with expertise in network operating systems (NOS).

“If you believe that IP-optical convergence is a trend, and Ciena does, then you need expertise in both areas,” says Joe Marsella, vice president, product line management, routing and switching at Ciena.

Joe Marsella

Ciena has been growing its IP expertise for the last five years. “We are competing against companies that have been doing this for 30 years,” says Marsella. “The more experience we can bring in, the more it helps us.”

Ciena says the deal emerged gradually. ”I can’t say it was a Ciena or an AT&T idea; it was a mutual discussion over time that finally resulted in an acquisition,” says Marsella.

Ciena will also gain its first R&D centre in Europe. The deal is expected to be completed before the year-end.

Click to read more ...

Broadcom’s 14.4-terabit Jericho2c+ router chip

The inexorable growth of IP traffic is being driven by ever more powerful devices being connected to the network and greater numbers of machines talking to each other.

In turn, Covid-19 has contributed its own traffic spike: AT&T reported that in September its core network traffic was 20 per cent up compared to March’s figures.

Jericho2c+ architecture. Source: Broadcom

The growth means that each new generation of router platform must at least double the traffic throughput while keeping the power consumption fixed.

This is a considerable challenge but one that the router chip designers continue to meet.

Click to read more ...

Open ROADM gets deployed as work starts on Release 6.0

AT&T has deployed Open ROADM technology in its network and says all future reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) deployments will be based on the standard. 

“At this point, it is in a single metro and we are working on a second large metro area,” says John Paggi, assistant vice president member of technical staff, network infrastructure and services at AT&T. 

Shown are the various elements included in the disaggregated Open ROADM MSA. Also shown is the hierarchical SDN controller architecture with the federated controllers overseeing the optical layer and the multi-layer controller overseeing the path creation across the layer, from IP to optical. Source: Open ROADM MSA

Meanwhile, the Open ROADM multi-source agreement (MSA) continues to progress, with members working on Release 6.0 of the standard. 

Click to read more ...

Will white boxes predominate in telecom networks?

Will future operator networks be built using software, servers and white boxes or will traditional systems vendors with years of network integration and differentiation expertise continue to be needed? 

AT&T’s announcement that it will deploy 60,000 white boxes as part of its rollout of 5G in the U.S. is a clear move to break away from the operator pack.

The service provider has long championed network transformation, moving from proprietary hardware and software to a software-controlled network based on virtual network functions running on servers and software-defined networking (SDN) for the control switches and routers.

Glenn WellbrockNow, AT&T is going a stage further by embracing open hardware platforms - white boxes - to replace traditional telecom hardware used for data-path tasks that are beyond the capabilities of software on servers.       

For the 5G deployment, AT&T will, over several years, replace traditional routers at cell and tower sites with white boxes, built using open standards and merchant silicon.

Click to read more ...

Juniper Networks opens up the optical line system

Juniper Networks has responded to the demands of the large-scale data centre players with an open optical line system architecture.

Donyel Jones-WilliamsThe system vendor has created software external to its switch, IP router and optical transport platforms that centrally controls the optical layer.

Juniper has also announced a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) - the TCX1000 - that is Lumentum’s own white box ROADM design. Juniper will offer the Lumentum white box as its own, part of its optical product portfolio.

The open line system architecture, including the TCX1000, is also being pitched to communications service providers that want an optical line system and prefer to deal with a single vendor.

“Juniper plans to address the optical layer with a combination of software and open hardware in the common optical layer,” says Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst at Cignal AI. “This is the solution it will bring to customers rather than partnering with an optical vendor, which Juniper has tried several times without great success.”

Click to read more ...

Sckipio’s G.fast silicon to enable gigabit services

Sckipio’s newest G.fast broadband chipset family delivers 1.2 gigabits of aggregate bandwidth over 100m of telephone wire.

The start-up’s SCK-23000 chipset family implements the ITU’s G.fast Amendment 3 212a profile. The profile doubles the spectrum used from G.fast from 106MHz to 212MHz, boosting the broadband rates. In contrast, VDSL2 digital subscriber line technology uses 17MHz of spectrum only.

“What the telcos want is gigabit services,” says Michael Weissman, vice president of marketing at Sckipio. “This second-generation [chipset family] allows that.”

Click to read more ...