Tellabs Blog

It seems laughable now, but I’m sure when Henry Ford introduced motorized vehicles, there was a vocal group that argued against moving away from dependable, proven horse-drawn carriages for transport.

There’s a similar debate going on now about the change to more efficient gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology for federal and commercial business networks. Some equipment vendors—and even an industry analyst—argue that legacy copper-based gigabit Ethernet is the right choice for local area networks (LANs). The analyst, Nicholas J. Lippis, even goes to far as to write a vendor-sponsored white paper questioning the relative value and benefits of GPON for campus networking.

I know which horse Tellabs picks in this race…and here’s why.

Traffic Growth is triggering the adoption of 100G in the Metro

Core DWDM networks have begun the shift to all-coherent technology based on 40G and 100G lambdas. Now the metro network is also experiencing significant traffic growth. 

Almost half of operators in a recent Heavy Reading survey (Metro Packet-Optical Transport 2.0: A Heavy Reading Survey Analysis, March 2013) see annual traffic growth in excess of 30%. A key driver of growth is traffic between data centers, with large numbers of data centers concentrated in major cities such as London (62 colocation data centers), New York (57) and Paris (45).

Small cells continue to interest mobile operators as a  way to increase coverage and capacity as well as enhance mobile broadband user experience. A challenge with small cell deployments is how to make them economically viable with the needed scalability range for small cell coverage.

Infonetics Research recently released its Carrier Ethernet Equipment report. This report confirmed what the industry already predicted - the Carrier Ethernet market is growing steadily, in the enterprise services industry. To understand why this is, we need to look back at the first initiatives for adoption.

Our new Optical LAN customer, Deltek, is a global enterprise software and information solution company. Deltek works with professional-services firms and government contractors in 80 countries, so it needs an enterprise LAN that performs well 24 X 7.