iiNet has revealed it’s trialling connections capable of up to 100Gbps inside its core network across Australia.
Network (Image Credit: Lars P./Flickr)
It is using the 100Gbps connections in its core network in a few sites around Australia, trialling it as a “solution” to increased demand placed on networks by growth in network-intensive web applications and increased amounts of users.
While iiNet says at this stage it doesn’t plan on expanding the 100Gbps connections outside of its own core network, it revealed it is the first carrier in the Asisa Pacific region to use the high-speed network standard that was ratified just last year.
“It’s exciting for us,” Balmik Soin, Operations Manager for iiNet Business, wrote in a post announcing the use of the 100Gbps connection.
“This doesn’t mean that we’re going to start rolling out 100Gbps everywhere, straight away as the technology still has some limitations. But it does mean that we’ve got experience with this cutting edge technology and can use it where we need it.”
The 100Gbps-capable router interface cards are provided by Juniper Networks, which it says provide “scalability and flexibility needed to fuel revenue from high-capacity services such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and video.”
“[The 100Gbps connection] has always been inevitable, it has just been a question of when — now trends such as cloud computing, data center consolidation and virtualization are making the need for 100 GE more acute and urgent than ever before,” Opher Kahane, senior vice president and general manager of Juniper Networks High-End Systems Business Unit, said in 2009.
Currently most of iiNet’s internal network consists of 10Gbps connections, but, as the National Broadband Network begins to rollout across the country and other, more network-intensive applications continue to grow in popularity, even these fast connections are beginning to feel the strain, iiNet says.
United States ISP Verizon was amongst the first to utilise the 100Gbps connections, implementing it in a number of locations over the course of last year to cope with demand.
However as mentioned before, there’s a number of issues that still need to be dealt with, because in order to reach 100Gbps, the laser pulses sent across the fibre optic are so short that over long distances messages can be distorted.
This means that for the moment, distances between connections have to be kept short at best, although many industry bodies are working hard on a solution to the problem.
Recent Comments