Breaking the 10.1G Bandwidth Barrier

The latest market projections indicate that global internet traffic will sustain 40-50% year-over-year growth for at least the next five years, with over the top (OTT) video being a major driver of this increase. That growth rate seems hard to imagine, however when looking back over the past 15 years, most rural service provider’s broadband networks have experienced a more than 1000x increase in packet traffic.

To support this network growth, rural service providers have upgraded access aggregation connections from multiple T1s of transport, to OC-12, OC-48 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), and eventually to OC-192 or 10 GbE. Supporting the next phase of growth beyond 10G will be challenging in multiple dimensions, particularly for access aggregation and collector rings. This challenge is often referred to as the 10.1G bandwidth barrier.