Transmode unveils iWDM-PON strategy/Ekinops joins 100-Gbps club
Transmode has announced its intention to support WDM-PON via its existing WDM platforms. The new iWDM-PON architecture will be designed to support multiservice access networks via standard C-Band DWDM optics.
Transmode’s iWDM-PON strategy will leverage its existing TM-Series and TG-Series Active and Passive WDM platforms, thus extending WDM metro network capabilities into FTTx applications, primarily in enterprise and backhaul scenarios to start. For example, Transmode plans to add existing active component to the passive TG-Series, as well as additional optics now in development, to create the iWDM-PON architecture.
For example, as Magnus Olson, director of hardware engineering at Transmode, described in a presentation today at the WDM-PON Forum in Orlando, Transmode plans to introduce WDM-PON friendly injection-locked self-tuning SFPs. The injection-locked technology provides the required central-office seeding light source for WDM-PON operation. The company also a low-cost fixed wavelength 1-Gbps DWDM SFP. The two new devices will significantly reduce the cost of WDM optics in access devices and simplify network deployments, Transmode asserts.
According to Olson, Transmode envisions the ability to support 40 channels via the iWDM-PON technology. Meanwhile, staying on the ITU-T grid in the C-Band promotes interworking among the access, metro, and core without the need for wavelength conversion. It also promotes the ability to extend WDM-PON reach via standard amplification and dispersion compensation technologies.
The use of WDM-PON enables service providers to increase capacity on a per-customer basis, Transmode adds.
Transmode expects customer trials of the new self-tuning iWDM-PON options to begin at the start of 2012, with network deployments planned in the middle of 2012.
France-based optical systems vendor Ekinops has unveiled its plans to support 100-Gbps transmission requirements. The company’s initial plans focus on a “pizza box” platform that can operate as either a muxponder or transponder.
According to Rob Adams, vice president of product marketing/product line management at Ekinops, the new platform will leverage OIF-standard dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) with coherent detection when it becomes commercially available later this year. However, since metro applications are among the company’s targets, Adams says that the ability to accommodate other, potentially more economical modulation formats is in the company’s plans and could be rolled out sometime next year.
The 1RU system, part of the Ekinops 360 family, leverages the T-Chip technology the company has used in other platforms. The programmability of the T-Chip enables the system to be upgraded in the field and converted from a muxponder to a transponder (or vice versa) as requirements change, Adams says. The T-Chip also applies Ekinops’s proprietary DynaFEC forward error correction (FEC), which Adams says will complement and extend the capabilities of common hard-decision and soft-decision FEC approaches.
For muxponder applications, the system will support a variety of interfaces, with 8G Fibre Channel most likely the lowest-rate interface that the company will target initially, Adams expects. However, it will offer the ability to support 12 SFP+ ports to enable aggregation of streams of lower than 10 Gbps.
The pizza-box approach reflects Ekinops’s belief that 100-Gbps requirements will remain at low volumes for the near term. However, the company also has a chassis-based approach that it plans to offer by the middle of next year, according to Adams.
