Nortel: 100G today, 100GE next year
Dec 16, 2009 11:16 AM, By Ed Gubbins
100G leader Nortel will join router vendors in the race to 100-Gb/s Ethernet but won?t threaten them
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Nortel Networks (OTC:NRTLQ) appears to have taken the lead in the 100-Gb/s long-haul optical market this week with its OME 6500 optical edge platform. But the other end of the 6500 -- the short-haul end -- won't go 100G until sometime in the back half of next year.
Nortel's 6500 includes a mix of what it calls "client-side" and "line-side" circuit packs. Traffic enters the router directly through the client-side interfaces, which each contain 10 10-GigE ports. Those 10 10GigE links are multiplexed through the backplane into a single 100G signal and handed off, by short-reach interfaces on the line-side, to optical components that can transport the signal over long distances -- hundreds of miles.
While those 100G long-haul capabilities are available today, Nortel won't add 100G Ethernet cards to the client side until "soon after" the IEEE finalizes its 100-GigE standards next June, a spokesperson for the vendor said.
The three leading router vendors ? Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Juniper (NYSE:JNPR) ? are all planning to introduce 100GigE capabilities to their routers shortly after the standard is done. Different development groups within the same vendors are also working on 100-gig
"They're just pretty far behind Nortel," said Andrew Schmitt, directing optical analyst with Infonetics Research.
But just as router vendors have had mixed results trying to sell carriers on the idea that optical gear and routers were just two sides of the same product, Nortel (soon to be Ciena [NASDAQ:CIEN], in this case) will find the same thing to be true. Its 100-GigE interfaces will likely be parked right next to 100-GigE interfaces from major router vendors, with Nortel handling the long-haul and one of four major vendors handling more local traffic.
"The amount of work that goes into those high-end routers that Cisco, Juniper Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei make ? there's only four vendors in world, and that's not going to change," Schmitt said.
Likewise, major router vendors will have a hard time trying to leverage their place in 100-gig networks to displace Nortel on the optical side. But in some markets, they won't have to.
"That 100-gig interface on the Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent boxes is addressing a market beyond just carriers," Schmitt said. "They can go after data-center providers and others that don't necessarily need to sling photons hundreds of kilometers." |
