Optical equipment vendors at the NXTcomm trade show this week are now dramatically boosting the capacity of their gear to keep up with the rapidly rising tide of network traffic. And those with reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers are bulking up their power as well.

Sycamore Networks, for example, is doubling the capacity of its biggest optical mesh switch to 2.5 Tb/s. The higher capacity will be available through a software upgrade near the end of this year, though the hardware of the SN 16000 MC-1024 optical switch—six chassis filling three bays—was designed to be able to carry that much traffic when it was first introduced seven years ago at the height of the telecom bubble. “We chose not to deploy that capacity back then because there was no demand for it,” said Kevin Oye, vice president of systems and technology for Sycamore. “Now our customers are saying their [1.25 Tb/s] systems are getting tapped out, and they could use additional capacity.”

Vendors are seeing the need for capacity increases across the board, from large long-haul cores to sparse rural areas. Turin Networks, for example, which focuses largely on rural telcos, is adding a new 10 Gb/s Ethernet module to the 10, 100, and 1000 Mb/s modules of its Traverse multiservice transport switch. At the same time, Ciena, which supplies some of the world’s largest carriers, is adding a new 40 Gb/s shelf to its CN 4200 multiservice transport platform. In addition, Ciena is introducing a much larger 16-slot version of its four-slot 4200. The new 4200 RS contains 96 ports per chassis, and carriers can link together up to 56 subtended units to build a platform capable of handling well over 5000 services. With the quadrupling of the product, the one-degree wavelength-selective switch (WSS) ROADM that Ciena added to the 4200 a year ago becomes a four-degree ROADM in a box.

“The creation of the CN 4200 RS was driven by customer demand for a bigger, denser chassis,” said Steve Alexander, chief technology officer for Ciena. “Large customers [were] stacking multiple CN 4200s at locations where they needed large channel counts to keep pace with services growth.”

ECI Telecom is also super-sizing its ROADM. At NXTComm, the Israeli vendor is announcing that this fall it will double the power of its 10-degree XDM WSS ROADM from 40 wavelengths to 80. Though ROADMs can attenuate signals, ECI claims to overcome this effect using a “bandwidth-tolerant” modulation format for 50 GHz-spaced filters that it demonstrated at an optical trade show in March. Using this approach, ECI’s transponders and amplifiers will extend the reach of its ROADM from about 1500 kilometers to 2000. The vendor is also planning to announce having sold its ROADM to a consortium of independent U.S. telcos that are using it to build a new statewide regional backbone network.