FEBRUARY 07, 2001 Corvis Puzzles Competitors
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Corvis Corp. (Nasdaq: CORV - message board) today announced two new products targeting regional networks and submarine cables (see Corvis Expands Product Portfolio ).
The products aim to carry up to 800 Gbit/s per fiber on cables with no intermediate amplifiers for distances of up to 350 kilometers. The CorWave XL supports simple point-to-point terrestrial connections and the CorWave XF supports “festoon” applications -- where subsea cables are looped along a coastline, linking multiple landing points.
Corvis says that it will ship these products in the second quarter of this year, making out that they mark a real breakthrough. Its press release quotes Andrew McCormick, a senior analyst with Aberdeen Group Inc., saying that Corvis is “first to commercialize Raman amplification.”
It’s “disruptive technology,” according to a quote attributed to David Huber, Corvis’s president and CEO, in the press release. It will enable Corvis to target new markets and new potential customers, it says.
Old hands in the submarine cable business are puzzled by Corvis’s claims. They say that Raman amplification in repeaterless subsea cable systems isn’t new. It was first demonstrated six years ago, when STC Submarine Cables -- now part of Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA - message board; Paris: CGEP:PA) –- showed a system driving 16 channels of 2.5 Gbit/s over a distance of 426km at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in 1995. The demo was repeated over a distance of 511km at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in the same year.
Alcatel has now installed a commercial system of this sort in Canada, according to Eric Brandon, manager of Alcatel’s unrepeatered system design team. In lab experiments, Alcatel has already demonstrated a system carrying 32 channels at 40 Gbit/s over 250km and plans to unveil a system carrying one terabit a second over 350km at OFC next month. For more details of Alcatel’s products in this field, see alcatel.com
Other submarine cable system vendors have also developed Raman amplication products. NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY - message board), for instance, says that it can already do 640 Gbit/s over 350km (see nec.co.jp.
-- Peter Heywood, international editor, Light Reading lightreading.com
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