Tom Hill wrote:
Once you get your head (and wallet) around that, there becomes a case for running each of your waves at 2.5x the rate they're employed at now. The remaining question is then to decide if that's cheaper than running more fibre.
It depends on distance between senders and receivers. However, at certain distance it becomes impossible to use efficient (w.r.t. bits per symbol) encoding, because of noise of repeated EDFA amplification.
Still a hard one to justify though, I agree.
For 50Gbps lane, it becomes even harder and, for 100Gbps lane, it will likely to be impossible.
I've recently seen a presentation from EPF** (by Juniper) that was *very* interesting in the >100G race, from a technical perspective. Well worth hunting that one down if you can, as it details a lot about optic composition in future standards, optic densities/backplanes, etc.
This one? http://www.peering-forum.eu/assets/presentations2012/JunpierEPF7.pdf But, it does not say much about >100G. Masataka Ohta