The push toward commercial 400-gigabit optical connections has surged as AT&T is now carrying traffic over a link in the South and targeted at its 5G network, and Juniper Networks claimed a successful trial with SCinet targeted at the supercomputing space. The best part is that both moves include “industry-first” claims and come as analysts predict the 400 gigabit Ethernet market (GbE) market won’t start to see broader adoption until next year.

AT&T’s effort has the carrier now carrying live internet traffic between Dallas and Atlanta. It’s based on its past work using white box hardware. AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch cited the collaboration with Ciena, UfiSpace, Broadcom, and InnoLight in powering the 400GbE service, which the carrier plans to have across its network by the end of next year.

The connection was deployed on an SDN-enabled system from Ciena. The carrier used Ciena’s Manage, Control, and Plan (MCP) domain controller to route and configure the 400GbE circuit. The MCP controller is integrated into AT&T’s ONAP management and control framework using an Open ROADM [reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexor] multi-source agreement (MSA) specified API.

The system also used a 400GbE transponder based on Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai coherent optical technology and Ciena’s ROADMs that were upgraded with new software to support flex grid. This allows for the software optimization of spectrum used on long-haul fiber based on speed and distance needs.

That circuit ran between white box routers supplied by UfiSpace that was compliant with Broadcom’s Jericho2 Distributed Disaggregated Chassis design that AT&T recently submitted to the Open Compute Project (OCP). The white box uses Broadcom’s Jericho2 packet processing chip and includes 10 400GbE interfaces on a two rack unit (2RU) server.

Those white boxes and Ciena transponders also included pluggable transceivers from InnoLight to support “cross-office connectivity between the packet and optical technologies.” The transceivers can transport 400GbE signals on up to two kilometers of single-mode fiber.

The carrier tied the 400GbE work to its ongoing 5G deployment where the optical network will be relied on to provide fiber transport. AT&T is on track for a “nationwide” 5G deployment by the middle of next year that will use its sub-6 GHz spectrum to cover at least 200 million people.

Juniper’s 400GbE success involved a field trial that used its PTX10003 Packet Transport Router to support traffic between the Supercomputing 2019 event in Denver and a location in Chicago. It was part of the 4.22 Tb/s connectivity link that SCinet provided at the conference. Ciena also provided routers, switches, and firewalls to that network.

JJ Jamison, CTO for research and education markets at Juniper, explained in a statement to SDxCentral that the distance difference (1,300 miles for the Juniper trial compared with around 781 miles for the AT&T trial) was part of what made its "industry first" more of a first.

"There is also a distinction between traffic carried: Juniper transported live high-performance computing (HPC) traffic, which can be challenging to buffer given the large flow, versus AT&T’s management of internet traffic," Jamison wrote.

A recent Dell’Oro Group report forecast that the adoption of 400GbE connections is not likely to gain traction until at least next year. The firm cited a current lack of demand and higher costs associated with the technology compared to 100GbE connections. However, the analyst firm did say it expects more than 15 million 400GbE switch ports to have been shipped by 2023.

"The deployments for SCinet and AT&T show that 400G IP routing is just around the corner," explained Shin Umeda, VP at Dell'Oro Group, in an email to SDxCentral. "The combination with long haul optical transport is an important use case that we expect see in large-scale internet and private backbone networks starting in 2021."