The end of 2009 saw a plethora of announcements regarding 100G trials and deployments from telecommunications operators such as Verizon and Deutsche Telekom, and system vendors such as Huawei, Nortel, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. The US operator Verizon claimed it was the first telecommunications carrier to successfully deploy a commercial 100G ultralong-haul optical system for live traffic between Paris and Frankfurt, based on Nortel technology. At around the same time, Huawei announced the successful completion of a 100G long-haul transmission field trial with Telefónica in Spain, covering a distance of more than 1,000 km without electrical regeneration. Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom announced a joint 100G field trial on an existing optical platform as part of the European 100GET project, and Nortel made several 100G announcements including a successful trial over a 600-km 100G link spanning from New York to Boston.
Developers of 40G and 100G technology are of course acutely aware of the need to keep costs down. For this reason, there is a strong drive to make the technology compatible with existing fibre infrastructure.
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