Verizon wraps 100G Ethernet network interface device trial

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is pushing the bandwidth boundaries of its Ethernet network, announcing that it recently completed a trial carrying 100G traffic over its regional network between two 100G network interface devices (NID).

The trial, which was conducted in the Dallas area using Canoga Perkins' 9145E100G CloudBuster Ethernet NID, transmitted 100G traffic for 4.6 miles (7.4 km) over the Verizon regional switched Ethernet services network.

Splice Communications, one of Verizon Global Wholesale's competitive carrier customers, provided connectivity to data center provider CyrusOne, which participated as an end user in the trial.

"The field trial was really an end to end circuit with Ethernet services running on it, including Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL)," said Vin Alesi, director of regional Ethernet product technology for Verizon, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The Canoga Perkins NID was located in Cyrus One's data center facility and we used 4.6 miles of our field fiber facilities to connect to our customer location to our serving wire center." 

During the course of the trial, Verizon measured various metrics, including: frame delay; delay variation, how much the delay varies from frame to frame; and throughput, the amount of data successfully delivered.

While many of the 100G deployments have been in the long-haul and metro networks of the largest telcos, there's an emerging demand from enterprise users for 100G and above services. Verizon and Canoga Perkins can use this trial as a potential blueprint for larger-scale deployments.

Alesi said that the "purpose of the field trial was to try to test and validate 100 GigE as an access product and taking it from the lab environment to the field."

Now that the trial is over, Verizon plans to conduct some additional business case analysis of the timing when we would launch a general product.

Having offered 10G Ethernet products for several years, 100 GigE is the next step in Verizon's Ethernet service evolution.

Verizon could potentially apply the 100 GigE service to both a series of retail enterprise and wholesale service opportunities, particularly wireless backhaul.

"We expect 100 GigE opportunities on wholesale and retail," Alesi said. "The biggest opportunity is probably the mobile backhaul where today we have some customers that buy multiple 10 GigE circuits to connect to their main switching office. In the future it would be good to have a single connection because today where they have those multiple 10 GigE handoffs it's duplicated for redundancy."

Alesi added that the 100 GigE product could be applicable for the "data center, and the government and education sector" segments. 

The telco has been one of the early adopters of 100G technology. Beginning in September, the service provider deployed 100G technology on one of its long-haul routes in the U.S. Since then the service provider has built out 100G on nearly 20,000 miles deployed on its U.S. network and 8,500 total 100G miles on its European network.

Following the upgrade of its long-haul networks, one the key developments with 100G has been to integrate the technology into its metro networks.

In April, the service provider announced that it was implementing Fujitsu's FLASHWAVE 9500 and the Tellabs 7100 platforms to provide connectivity to each of its carrier and business customers. Earlier in 2012, Verizon added Ciena's control-plane technology to simplify network management and reduce optical circuit provisioning time.

For more:
- see the release

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Updated article on July 17 with quotes from Vin Alesi, director of regional Ethernet product technology for Verizon.