Cisco Systems' 100 Gigabit spans metro to ultra long-haul

Cisco Systems has demonstrated 100 Gigabit transmission over a 3,000km span. The coherent-based system uses a single carrier in a 50GHz channel to transmit at 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps). According to Cisco, no Raman amplification or signal regeneration is needed to achieve the 3,000km reach.

Feature: Beyond 100G - Part 2

"The days of a single modulation scheme on a part are probably going to come to an end in the next two to three years"

Greg Nehib, Cisco 

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Cisco's P-OTS: Denser and distributed

Cisco Systems’ carrier packet transport (CPT) product family adds metro packet optical transport to its existing switch and router offerings.

Cisco claims the CPT is its second-generation packet optical transport system (P-OTS), complementing the ONS 15454. But some analysts view the CPT as the vendor’s first true packet optical transport product.

"This announcement is an acknowledgement that P-OTS equipment is important and that operators are insisting on it"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

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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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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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