Updated: 17 November 2009
The increasing volume of YouTube viewers has speeded the creation of higher capacity Internet. Led by Ericsson, the Swedish electronics industry is working with European partners to increase the bandwidth by ten times. They want the world using Swedish technology to build tomorrow’s communications systems.
The need for Internet transmission capacity in the transport networks is almost doubling each year as video sites like YouTube and WebTV gain in popularity.
“Watching a 30 minute film uses the same space as 30 days of ordinary surfing. Just on video sites, the US saw an increase in capacity last year equivalent to all Internet use for the year 2000. LTE, the next generation mobile communications system, is also raising bandwidth demand,” explains Arne Alping at Ericsson.
This realisation triggered the formation of a European consortium known as 100GET, in which Ericsson collaborates with other major system suppliers including Nokia-Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent. The goal for these otherwise fierce competitors is to jointly assess the best and most costeffective technologies to renew the industry in competition with the outside world – and get the optical transport network to cope with 100 Gigabits per second.
Ericsson is using its world-leading knowledge of radio-based technology to coordinate one of five subsidiary projects aimed at transmitting across distances of up to 600 km by optical fibres.
“Ericsson’s core expertise is radio base stations and microwave links, so that’s the technology we’ll exploit. But we’ve got to show our technology is the most cost-effective,” says Alping.
One objective is to reduce costs by transferring signal processing from optical components to electronics. “We’ve seen the unit price of electrical components falling as volumes increase. Optical components are not doing this quite as much,” says Alping.
An important participant in this work is SP Devices, a small company in Linköping that develops Analogue to Digital Converters. These turn analogue signals into digital “ones and zeros”. The objective is to link together several converters and boost the conversion speed, as well as producing new types of digital signal processing.
“For today’s optical fibre data transfers, you can use a flashing light, where on means “1” and off means “0”. But when the capacity goes up tenfold to 100 Gigabits per second, we need subtler signals with a spectrum between on and off. Then it’s like a radio communications system,” explains Jonas Nilsson, MD of SP Devices.
Collaborating with global actors is good for both sides, he explains.
“They get access to our leading expertise in ADC technology, and our products get incorporated into the big companies’ development work.”
