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Sprint moving to 400Gb backbone


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Saw this article this morning. Should give Sprint plenty of headroom for future traffic increases.

 

http://www.lightread...?doc_id=221923

 

Edit:

Full Press release http://www.ciena.com/corporate/news-events/press-releases/Sprint-Upgrades-Network-with-Ciena-Coherent-Optical-Technology.html

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Saw this article this morning. Should give Sprint plenty of headroom for future traffic increases.

 

http://www.lightread...?doc_id=221923

 

That's just for their internet backbone. Not local backhaul. They really need to start buying up some metro fiber loops. I think Level 3 has a quite a few.

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400GB/s, moving to 1TB/s, holy guacamole, that is some crazy speed. It also shows what LTE, LTE-A, and 5G will require for backhaul and WAN.

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Their switches often already choke where they connect to the internet. It's going to be even more crucial for their 4G cores to have a full pipe to the internet. 400GB/s is good, but it's only a stop on the Metro line. They will need 1TB/s before they know it. Sounds like Sprint is trying to keep just ahead of the curve.

 

Robert

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Notice I said backbone not backhaul. We are talking about Sprints connections from city to city and to the internet not from tower to tower.

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Hopefully sprint will have a lot of peering capacity to back this up. Luckily adding peering is the relatively easy part.

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Remember also it's 400Gb/sec not 400GB/sec.

 

I'm having a flashback to Kindergarten. "OK Bobby, big B, and little b. Do you see the difference?" :hah:

 

Robert

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Nice to see that they're at least doing some upgrades to their wireline division.

 

Yeah, I think they're going from 10Gb/sec to 400Gb/sec. Quite a jump. They still need to acquire a metro fiber loop company and develop some sort of a cloud presence. Actually now that I think about it, Sprint really needs to set them free and sign a long term contract with them. They can then merge with Level 3 and or Global Crossing and start becoming more of a player in the cloud industry. Let's face it, we will all live in the cloud fairly soon. It will be nice is the wireline division is not hamstrung by Sprint's financial condition. Heck, maybe Century Link may absorb them.

Edited by bigsnake49
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Sprints IP backbone currently leverages 40Gb and 10Gb links IIRC, hard to find info. Note that the PR mentioned this Ciena kit being used for wireless and wireline. I don't think sprint is maintaining two IP backbones one each for their transport business and wireless business but it is possible.

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Ah, Sprint is using the Cisco CRS as their backbone router so no 40Gb ethernet. Looks like 10Gb and 100Gb only for them for now.

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Ah, Sprint is using the Cisco CRS as their backbone router so no 40Gb ethernet. Looks like 10Gb and 100Gb only for them for now.

 

I thought that the Ciena kit allows them to gracefully migrate to 40G, 100G and 400G in phases.

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The Cienna kit takes connections from one or many routers and puts them on one fiber using DWDM which is a type of optical multiplexing so that you can have 40 - 10Gb, 4 - 100Gb, or 1 - 400Gb links share one fiber pair between two points up to 9,000KM apart(at lower speeds). It also allows traditional voice circuits(TDM) to share the same fiber as ethernet traffic without the need for using VOIP. This allows Sprint to upgrade capacity without running more fiber or having to replace every component, they simply replace cards on the Cisco routers and Ciena optical shelf on a link by link basis. I am not an optical networking expert so please forgive any errors.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing

http://media.ciena.com/documents/ActivFlex_6500_Packet_Optical_Platform_DS.pdf

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I love S4GRU and all the different backgrounds of knowledge everyone has. I am sitting back and learning things myself from my own website. This is great. Thanks to everyone for their contributions to this thread.

 

I am very happy with where we have progressed to. It's exceeded my wildest expectations.

 

Robert

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Robert, we just need to keep up these highly technical and informative discussions and not have it become another Sprintusers or Howardforums.

 

I think he does a great job of keeping it clean!

 

I got to visit the Sprint switch in NYC, now that's an experience!

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Robert, we just need to keep up these highly technical and informative discussions and not have it become another Sprintusers or Howardforums.

I think he does a great job of keeping it clean!

 

We are trying. So far, it's working out. We have chased off or converted all the trouble makers to date.

 

Robert

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Sprint doesn't need peering agreements, they are still a Tier-1 backbone provider. Other networks peer with Sprint, not the other way around. Sprint already has settlement-free interconnects with the other big global backbone providers. People forget that Sprint has fiber criss-crossing the country and owns stakes in undersea cables. Their marketshare has been falling (mostly from others expanding, not from them losing any customers) but they are still one of the "big boys".

 

If they had been smart, they would have snapped up some of the fiber companies when they all went bust after the dot-com boom and kept their ILEC business... people like Cogent and Level3 were snapping them up for pennies-on-the-dollar compared to what it cost to put the fiber in the ground. They'd be able to leverage video in ILEC markets ($$$) and to provide their own tower backhaul in areas with fiber loops (carrying traffic across their existing national fiber network), along with agreements with Verizon/ATT for backhaul swaps in their respective ILEC territories.

 

If they ever try to spin off the backbone network watch out... that's their only "seat at the table" left (as far as playing with the big boys is concerned.)

 

I presume their cell tower backhaul contracts route traffic to the nearest Sprint POP so they can at least carry their internal network traffic on their own network instead of paying someone else to do it... plus at that point it becomes settlement-free so they don't have to pay ATT to take their packets (for example). If they aren't doing this then they must be dumb as rocks.

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