Press Release

Through 100GET, ADVA Optical Networking helps define path to 100Gbit/s in the metro

June 10, 2008.

ADVA Optical Networking today announced that the company is heading a group of university and enterprise partners in developing standards-based, carrier-class metropolitan Ethernet transport networks that cost-effectively deliver data transport speeds of 100 Gigabits per second (100Gbit/s). The metro-focused group is one of four in the “100GET” (GET=Gigabit Ethernet Transport) innovation initiative that is scheduled to continue until 2010 and receive total public and private investment of more than EUR 200 million. The primary goal of the project is to develop a 100Gbit/s muxponder prototype for the metro area. Further plans call for ADVA Optical Networking’s systems to enable a 100Gbit/s demonstrator at Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute (http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/), as well as in the OCTET (Open Environment for Advanced Carrier Ethernet Technologies) field testbed from Deutsche Telekom. Additional field trials are planned.

“ADVA Optical Networking’s real-world, global market experience with the unique challenges and requirements in the metro is invaluable to 100GET,” said Hans-Joachim Grallert, Managing Director of Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin and Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. “Collaborative research and grid computing in the research-and-education community is creating the first demands for 100Gbit/s, but any projection of metro bandwidth need shows that this unprecedented level of bandwidth is obviously on the horizon across carrier and enterprise networking. The 100GET project is proactively addressing this reality by bringing together thought leaders in the optical-networking community to develop technologies, components and methods that cost-effectively deliver new levels of transmission capacity, security and service quality. ADVA Optical Networking is an important member of our team.”

Government agencies in Finland, France, Germany and Sweden are helping fund 100GET (www.celtic-initiative.org/Projects/100GET/), which launched in 2007 with the participation of ADVA Optical Networking and about 30 other companies, research organizations and universities. Goals include defining a complete, system-integrated telecommunications solution for transmitting high-quality, 100Gbit/s services at lowest cost—and, ultimately, driving associated standards through organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union—Standardization (ITU-T), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The 100GET collaborators will create a test bed open to European suppliers.

Ongoing growth in bandwidth-hungry services such as grid computing, telemedicine, storage, e-commerce and video-based consumer broadband continues to expand capacity requirements across global networks. Global Internet traffic grew by 57 percent between mid 2006 and mid 2007, according to CELTIC, the European research-and-development consortium that is orchestrating 100GET. Consequently, network operators are preparing their optical infrastructures to scale beyond today’s 10Gbit/s and 40Gbit/s capabilities.

“We are already seeing questions about 100Gbit/s networking in every request for proposal we receive from large network operators today,” said Christoph Glingener, chief technology officer of ADVA Optical Networking. “It is our responsibility to our customers to help ensure they are able to gracefully and affordably adopt 100Gbit/s Packet Optical Transport capabilities when they are ready to do so. Our carrier and enterprise customers must not be stranded with legacy WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) gear, 10Gbit/s systems or ROADMs (reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers) that fail to interoperate with new, higher-capacity solutions. Our investment and participation in 100GET and our internal development of 100Gbit/s are outgrowths of this responsibility.”

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