Ciena enhances its 6500 packet-optical transport family

Ciena has upgraded its 6500 family of packet-optical transport platforms with the T-series that supports higher-capacity electrical and optical switching and higher-speed line cards.

"The 6500 T-Series is a big deal as Ciena can offer two different systems depending on what the customer is looking for," says Andrew Schmitt, founder and principal analyst of market research firm, Cignal AI.

Helen XenosIf customers want straightforward transport and the ability to reach a number of different distances, there is the existing 6500 S-series, says Schmitt. The T-series is a system specifically for metro-regional networks that can accommodate multiple traffic types – OTN or packet.

"It has very high density for a packet-optical system and offers pay-as-you-grow with CFP2-ACO [coherent pluggable] modules," says Schmitt.

Ciena says the T-series has been developed to address new connectivity requirements service providers face. Content is being shifted to the metro to improve the quality of experience for end users and reduce capacity on backbone networks. Such user consumption of content is one factor accounting for the strong annual 40 percent growth in metro traffic.

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PMC unveils OTN framer for IP core and edge routers

PMC-Sierra’s latest Optical Transport Network (OTN) framer chip for IP core and edge routers doubles throughput to 240 gigabit.

The Meta-240G frames IP router traffic using OTN before passing the traffic to the transport network. Line-rate encryption is included on-chip to secure traffic between data centres and traffic in the cloud.

Source: PMC-Sierra

Adding OTN to a router delivers several benefits, says PMC. OTN helps identify networking faults more quickly and simplifies the monitoring and enforcement of service-level agreements. OTN also includes forward-error correction which benefits optical link performance. 

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