|
NewsGlobe: Currents
AT&T bumps U.S. MPLS backbone speed up to 40 Gbps
Initial capacity jump presages future move to 100 Gbps
by Doug Allen
Here’s one that slipped through the cracks among all the M&A activity and FCC edicts this month; AT&T recently announced the completion of an upgrade to its U.S. core IP/MPLS backbone network, raising its per-wavelength capacity to SONET OC-768. That’s 40 Gbps, across more than 80,000 lit wavelength-miles of fiber, according to AT&T, though, given the carrier’s four-fiber routes, that number might come down to 20,000 route miles of 40 Gbps ultra long-haul DWDM—the largest such deployment in the world. This backbone is the transport foundation for all of AT&T’s Internet and IP services, wireline and wireless, for both consumer and business customers.
The additional capacity probably won’t have a dramatic impact on network performance in the near-term, but gives AT&T a slight performance edge from POP to POP over the bulk of its competitors who are still running at 10 Gbps. The extra bandwidth will create even more headroom for higher MPLS class of service (CoS) tiers, assuring the necessary bandwidth for prioritized sessions. That advantage will become more pronounced as traffic demand, especially for high-capacity business applications and video services, grows in the mid-to-long term—in effect future-proofing the core network for demand that may surge faster than incremental capacity increases can handle.
However, AT&T’s edge over its closest rivals may not last long, as other telcos eye similar upgrades. Verizon Business has already deployed 40 Gbps router-to-router connections across two ultra long-haul DWDM routes last year with Juniper T-Series routers. High-capacity wholesale carriers such as Sprint and XO aren’t quite ready to move to 40 Gbps until it installs higher-capacity optical transport platforms, but have moved to 40 Gbps-capable Cisco CRS-1 routers.
AT&T is also betting on the Cisco CRS-1 platform to deliver a unified, consolidated (as in converged) high-capacity mesh MPLS core. Previously, the carrier had gone with two different parallel router cores; one from Avici systems (now Soapstone Networks) for its MPLS PNT traffic, and Cisco’s MGX8850 multiservice switch/routers for VPN services.
“…Completing its upgrade to a 40Gbps core network—which the carrier describes as currently the largest deployment in the world [pegged at roughly 16 Pbytes of IP and data traffic per business day]—is largely about bragging rights,” writes Brian Washburn and Cindy Whelan, Research Director and Senior Analyst respectively at Current Analysis, in a recent intelligence report. “In smaller parts, AT&T’s upgrade benefits the carrier and its customers by upping speeds while consolidating all IP traffic on a unified router platform, and the upgrade may also enable minor improvements to network performance [in terms of slightly lower latency, slightly less jitter, and slightly better packet delivery across each service tier].”
While crossing the OC-768 milestone, AT& T has also completed successful initial trials of 100 Gbps transmission. The test took place across a 622-km span with 161 wavelengths at 114 Gbps, using transmission gear from NEC and Corning. Noting that Verizon Business has already run its own 100 Gbps trials with Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens gear, Washburn says the steady advance of core transport technology may enable other major carriers to leapfrog from the typical 10 Gbps per wavelength backbone rates to 100 Gbps/wavelength in the mid-term future, bypassing incremental capacity enhancements to the 40 Gbps level. “It seems practically certain that more 100 Gbps service provider field developments will roll out in 2009.”
|
|
|
