Forget 4G, Verizon Cranks Up Their Backbone Speed to 100G
posted Wednesday Sep 21, 2011 by Nicholas DiMeo
Ever wanted to download a full Blu-ray movie in a few seconds? Well, very soon your prayers may be answer and you will be able to thank Verizon for making it happen. Big Red has said this week that it will be accomplishing an industry first when it flips the switch on its already-deployed 100Gbps data connection. You heard right: 100Gbps. This is technology so fast, that an MP3 file would be downloaded before you could even think of wanting to listen to it.
Unfortunately, those speeds aren't available at your house yet. Why? We have the answer after the break.
This portion of the company's backbone network - which means it's not part of the system that actually reaches customers - currently runs from Chicago to New York and is an optical system supplied by network specialist company Ciena.
Verizon has also announced that it has plans to roll out (if successful) the same tech on more than 10 other lines before this year is out, with routes from Sacramento to Los Angeles and Minneapolis to Kansas City. The company supplying the solution for this is Ciena, which Verizon also used when it rolled out the 100Gbps connectivity in Europe between Paris and Frankfurt. Interestingly, Alcatel-Lucent, another telecom company, has already deployed a successful 100Gbps line in Europe in the same region. However, Comcast and AT&T have been saying for over a year that they have plans to do the same here in the States, but that has yet to come to light, where Verizon's plan looks to be happening very soon.
So what does this all mean for us, the regular consumer? Well, a few things are going to improve. We should not only see a slight decrease in lag time connecting to and from servers, but for Verizon customers, your FiOS network will now be able to carry 10 times more traffic than it could before. This new deployment also means better, more efficient handling of the traffic on the network.
Verizon vice president of global network panning, Ihab Tarazi, said,
We're seeing not only growth in traffic, but also in the need for immediacy from our customers that are managing financial transactions, health-care data exchange, energy services and entertainment on-the-go.
The good news here is that Verizon has already conducted successful real-use trials of the technology back in 2007, including 450Gbps and 1Tbps on the same lines as that of the 100Gbps rate! This will hopefully mean really powerful, fast and stable connections for all consumers very soon. The broadband revolution has arrived at last.