100 Mbps broadband is coming to consumers as surely as night follows day. To achieve those speeds, backbone networks will have to be upgraded to handle speeds up to 100 Gbps. Nextgen says the faster backbone is needed to support the spread of “super-fast” fixed and wireless broadband access networks.
Nextgen Networks, Australia’s third largest fiber network, used Alcatel-Lucent gear to demonstrate 100 Gbps over its backbone network. The company said that demands for higher speeds and fatter broadband pipes are driven by data-hungry devices like smartphones, video downloads, device-to-device communications and, in the future, new content-rich services such as 3D video or remote healthcare applications, all of which rely on guaranteed quality of service.
The demonstration showed that Alcatel-Lucent’s optical and IP technologies can be used to simultaneously stream more than 15,000 HD videos or transfer over 100,000 MP3 files in 60 seconds.
“Super-fast access at the home or enterprise means that service providers like Nextgen will need to scale their backbone capacity,” said James Watt, head of Alcatel-Lucent’s optical activities. He said the company’s innovations in optical and IP are driving a key evolutionary advancement, offering improvements in overall network scaling from today’s 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps.
“This is a key part of our ongoing program to create a converged optical/IP backbone that is more cost-effective to run and scale and is ten times faster than the links that are commonly used today,” said Phil Sykes, managing director of Nextgen Networks.