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Comcast Kicks Tires On 100-Gig Optical Links

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat Mar 15, 2008 04:33 AM
from the that's-a-lot-of-torrents dept.
Networking IT
Balistyx writes to mention that Comcast has announced the first test of 100-gigabit-per-second optical networking equipment designed to carry data over a production fiber network. The trial equipment will connect Philadelphia and McLean, VA. "In November, Verizon said it completed the first field test of 100-Gbps optical transmission on a live 312-mile network route between Tampa, Fla., and Miami. The telco's test used a live video feed from the FiOS TV network, and optical equipment from Alcatel-Lucent. Comcast's test is different, according to Schanz, for several reasons: It's running live traffic, and the 100-Gbps wavelengths in the Comcast trial are running over the same physical fiber as its existing 40-Gbps wavelengths, which are handled by Cisco Systems gear."
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Submission: Comcast Kicks Tires On 100-Gig Optical Links by Balistyx (1233750)
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  • Keypoints.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by EssJay (134044) on Saturday March 15 2008, @04:52AM (#22758556)
    Some interesting keypoints:
    • "The 100-Gbps trial connects Comcast facilities in Philadelphia and to McLean, Va., running over the operator's metro and long-haul fiber links. Comcast is using preproduction versions of Nortel Networks' 100-Gbps interface cards, running in the vendor's Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 system"
    • "It's running live traffic, and the 100-Gbps wavelengths in the Comcast trial are running over the same physical fiber as its existing 40-Gbps wavelengths, which are handled by Cisco Systems gear"
    • "It's not on some dedicated facility ... It's on [the] production fiber, next to other lambdas."
    • "Comcast believes it's the first test of 100-Gbps wavelengths with reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) photonic components."

  • What good is it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan541 (1032000) <DanNO@SPAMdanscomp.net> on Saturday March 15 2008, @04:57AM (#22758566)
    But what good is this 100 gigs if you can only pay for it but not use it?

    ~Dan

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Erpo (237853)
      You beat me to it! I was going to write something like:

      "Now, subscribers can begin paying overage fees and experiencing reduced speeds just six seconds after the beginning of the each new billing cycle."
      • I figure it at just over 25 seconds (without any protocol overhead) to approach their cap. I don't think my HD can lay down 300GiBs that fast though. I would however like to try.
      • My thoughts (including him beating me to it) exactly.

        I recently left Comcast for Verizon FiOS. I even went to the local office and told them I had been a customer of theirs for over 20 years, as the local company was bought out several times, and they may want to take note on why a 20 year customer would leave. I gave them 10 reasons, but cited as top: 1) Bandwidth limits they refused to state, leaving me wondering if I was close or not and leading me to restrict a lot of my browsing, 2) Upload speeds slo

    • But what good is this 100 gigs if you can only pay for it but not use it?

      ~Dan
      If your ISP then uses traffic shaping to manage you downloading via this big fat fast pipe?

    • Re:What good is it? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sahonen (680948) on Saturday March 15 2008, @06:27AM (#22758764) Homepage Journal
      Hit the nail on the head. I have Comcast's fastest plan in this area and I can only sustain an FTP upload at 50 KB/sec. At 3am. To my own private server. It's ridiculous and unacceptable. If I had ANY alternative I would switch immediately. If having all this extra bandwidth means they can relax their insane throttling I'm all for it as long as they don't try to charge me extra for the privilege. I know for a fact that there's more than enough bandwidth in the pipe. They're just not giving any of it to me.
      • Every day I look up on the telephone pole at verizon's FIOS hookup, yearning for when it goes active. The guy who was working on it said it wouldn't go live until late april.

        The only problem is that I hate verizon as much as I hate comcast.
        • Out of curiosity, how does /. feel about Earthlink? I understand that they don't throttle bittorrent.

          • Out of curiosity, how does /. feel about Earthlink? I understand that they don't throttle bittorrent.
            Anyone who doesn't censor the Internet is ok in my book.

            ~Dan

      • I don't like comcast, they brag a lot, but don't show results. I use Qwest, and can get a few things going at 50 kb/sec, if not higher. I do pay for a dedicated 7mbs, but shrug.
      • I have the exact same dilemma, down to every detail 100%. Sounds like a hard limit to me. Any others confirm the 50kb upload cap on their Comcast account?
    • Oh, they'll use it, but they'll prioritize HD PPV television over Internet. They've been chomping at the bit to get even with FIOS and U-Verse.
  • I won't believe it until Comcast runs a 100 Gb/s link to my apartment for me to try out. For free. After that, I'll be happy to recommend them to Slashdot users and anyone else they want me to promote to. Hey, everyone has their price! :) (Now to see if the Comcast execs will take my bait...)
  • Awesome! Now they can slow down my P2P traffic even faster!!

  • Comcast has announced the first test...to carry data over a production fiber network. The trial equipment will connect Philadelphia and McLean, VA.
    Oh, let me quickly move my back......connection lost

    Seriously, why are they testing trial equipment on a produciton network?
  • A couple of questions:

    Cable
    What is the end cost to the users? I understand that Comcast has a modulated speed. One big pipe, a lot of users on the same pipe. Farther from the hub? fewer users, smaller pipe.
    Will you be able to pay for more of that pipe and get better speeds?
    Can you pay them not to downsize your P2P?
    With the new Hulu site out there, will they mistakenly see legal traffic as illegal and stop it from working?

    DSL
    For DSL, what speeds could you buy? (They mentioned Verizon testing)How mu
  • Otherwise, are they getting tired of optical thingies? It makes no sense. It must be a misspelling.
  • Wait - they used a competitor's TV signal to test the speed of their lines? They must realize they're in bad shape, bandwidth-wise.
  • I live in Philadelphia. No FIOS, no Comcast Blast. Just standard DSL or standard cable speeds, those are our options. I'm 100% certain Comcast won't sell anything faster until we have FIOS here, and I'm 100% certain we will never have FIOS here because Comcast is based out of Philadelphia. Thanks for nothing, Comcast.

    • I dunno. They're tearing the shit out of this (east) end of South St and running something electrical to each building on the street. I need to ask one of the workers exactly what they're doing, but I'm hoping it's FIOS. They also cut down all the trees so the roots wouldn't fuck with whatever they're laying down.

  • You deploy these http://cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index.html [cisco.com]

    Which btw during development was not referred to as the CRS, but the BFR (Big F-ing Router; ala Doom's BFG).

    • The Crash-1 only does 40 Gbps (OC768) as far as I can tell. This is Nortel gear; not sure what they're feeding it with, since at speeds like that you'd rather do switching, not routing.

      There's been somewhat of a race in the industry between the people who think the next step after 10 Gbps should be 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps - 10 was a really convenient speed, because the Telecom/SONET part of the world does multiples of ~155 Gbps * 2**N, so OC192 is basically the same speed as 10GE and they can reuse many of the

  • You mean the company that on day one of my service ( they bought my local provider out, wasn't my choice ) bricked my modem and told me to call back in a week if i was still having troubles? ( as did several others that i know personally that had the same problem. Some on cable, others on DSL.. ) And gotta love that 'welcome letter' i got. "welcome to comcast, your rates are now increasing by 20 a month"

    The same comast that hasn't stayed up for more then 3 days straight and i have to restart my modem?

    The
  • Japan's customers are being offered 1Tb connections for three-fiddy/month. Meanwhile, Comcast has announced that they are going to redirect 95% of their R&D and deployment budgets to paying for Washington lobbyists and contributions to national party coffers to get FCC oversight to be eliminated.
  • Going to take serious subprime bailouts to pay for these cable plans.

    • Re:100 gbps wavelength? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358) on Saturday March 15 2008, @05:06AM (#22758600) Homepage Journal
      Backbone fiber uses wavelength division multiplexing, which means that more than one color of light carries data over the fiber. So it's common to talk about lighting up a wavelength ("lighting a lambda"), and in general to use "wavelength" to mean one of the several carrier frequencies on the fiber.

      So a "100 Gbps wavelength" means a single laser-receiver pair modulated to carry 100 Gbps.
      • Though the article is ambiguous. When it says "100 Gbps wavelengths" it could mean multiple wavelengths each carrying part of the data stream.

        • Re:100 gbps wavelength? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jonaskoelker (922170) <jonaskoelker@nOSpAM.gnu.org> on Saturday March 15 2008, @06:15AM (#22758734) Homepage
          If you read one of the linked articles [verizon.com], you'll learn that

          Unlike other trials that used 10 separate 10 Gbps wavelengths to carry 100 Gbps, the Verizon test utilized a 100 Gbps signal on a single wavelength.
          Other interesting things from that article:

          "This is another critical milestone on our way to ensuring that we have the most advanced telecom network technology at the right time, in the right place, to serve our customers,"
          Having never used Comcast, I'll leave it to those who have to asses the meaning of "serve our customers".

          "The field trial also confirms optical networking's role as a critical enabler for competitive transformation, as new services and applications reshape network requirements."
          I thought peer-to-peer data transfer already "reshaped network requirements" and left the ISPs struggling to keep up.

          "Applications based on online video are clearly drivers for higher bandwidth [...]"
          Again, how about peer-to-peer transfer.

          "Transmission at 100 Gbps will enable low latency and significant improvement in real-time transaction. Trading institutions and other Verizon customers using real-time communications will find the associated performance very attractive."
          I can transfer 100 Gbps by putting hard disks in my backpack and running a short sprint. This is orthogonal to latency (which is what real-time is about). Okay, strawman. Assume the big fiber is deployed, and everybody uses it. Then you'll run into contention issues, and your packet will sit in a queue. I'm not saying bigger pipes won't help, but I want an arguement; right now, all I have is a claim.
          • I want an argument...
            OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.

          • Having never used Comcast, I'll leave it to those who have to asses the meaning of "serve our customers".
            Let's just say that if this system doesn't include whips, truncheons, or water boarding, then it's not on par with how they normally service their customers.
      • If you need to see it in action, there is an Emacs command to do that of course, C-x M-c M-comcast.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by patlabor (56309)
        Although these dense wavelength division multiplexing systems (DWDM) are using different wavelengths, they are barely different, with lambdas separated by just a few (really almost one) nanometers (10^-9 m). This is possible because looking at the wavelength shows that there is a separation of 100 GHz for 1550 nm systems. DWDM is currently the most efficient (by density) method for transmitting mutiple frequencies of light, and the most resiliant to noise. The wavelengths are always grouped together in cent
      • Calling them "different colors" doesn't mean much to us mere humans, since the whole set of "colors" used is way down in the infra-red range. But since this is laser light anyway, you need to be extra careful when handling those devices: even though you cannot see the light rays, they can still damage your retina.

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