The telecom industry has shown continuous interest in 100G technology, but the costs need to come down to a level comparable to 10G. One of the key concerns the industry has is the cost of the first generation line cards, and the timing of when the second generation solutions will be available.
Tony Hu, Vice President of the Huawei Carrier IP Product Line, explores the trends for 100G, including Huawei’s efforts in reducing its costs, 100G applications, and the latest updates to Huawei’s 200G line card.
Chipsets are the basic component of a powerful router, not only the forwarding chipset, but also the switching and management chipsets, as QoS is very important to routers. To ensure smooth network migration, Huawei designed its 100G line cards based on the daughter card design, where operators can flexible configure the 100G, 40G, 10G, and GE interfaces together, enabling smoothly migration from low-speed interfaces to higher ones.
However, a 100G network not only consists of 100G routers, but also DWDM components; Huawei is good at both. Based on Huawei’s 100G solution, service providers can build a powerful E2E 100G pipe to carry various services. As of January 2012, Huawei shipped over 30 100G NE5000E systems, with 4 sets of 2x2 cluster routers. Huawei is expected to deploy over 60 NE5000E systems with 100G technology, with over hundreds of ports. These router systems can be applied for fast-expanding IP backbone networks, metro egress routers, data center interconnections, cloud computing gigabit routers. In addition, Huawei 200G line card is a full-service one that can supports various applications – including QoS, MPLS, clock synchronization, and IPv6 – at different network layers.
