The Cisco® ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) supports a 100-Gbps Full C-Band Tunable CP-DQPSK DWDM Trunk Card, which simplifies the integration and transport of 100 Gigabit Ethernet and OTU-4 interfaces and services into enterprises or service provider optical networks. Release 9.6 of the Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP extends the total data transport capacity by a factor of three, allowing dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) transmission of up to 9.6 Tbps (96 services at 100 Gbps) in the C-band. Challenge and Solution The bandwidth carried on core and metropolitan DWDM networks is growing exponentially, while operators’ revenues are not keeping pace. The Cisco ONS 15454 100-Gbps solution can dramatically lower the cost to carry bandwidth, helping to maintain and improve customers’ profitability. Internet growth is still exponential, mainly because of demand for next-generation services such as quadruple play (data, voice, video, and mobility), video distribution, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and other high-bandwidth services. Owing to advanced modulation techniques, the ability to transmit 100G wavelengths on existing or new DWDM systems maximizes return on investment by increasing the overall capacity per fiber pair without affecting the unregenerated transmission distance supported by the system. Scaling from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps and now 100 Gbps multiplies by a factor of 10 the bandwidth that can be transported over existing fiber networks. New coherent polarization-multiplexing differential quadrature phase shift keying (CP-DQPSK) modulation enables 9.6-Tbps capacity transmission over ultralong-haul (ULH) networks with more than 2,500 km of unregenerated optical spans. The Cisco ONS 15454 MSTP 100-Gbps Full-Band Tunable CP-DQPSK DWDM Trunk Card is designed to provide the following benefits: - 100-Gbps wavelength transport over fully uncompensated networks, with more than 2,500 km of unregenerated optical spans - Enable 100-Gbps transport over very low-quality fiber with very high polarization mode dispersion (PMD) - Support up to 96 100-Gbps wavelengths (50-GHz channels spacing) with very high tolerance to filtering penalties - Improve overall system density up to 100 Gbps per slot, which is 5 times greater than the density achieved with 40-Gbps units - Support a number of different configurations (transponder, muxponder, regenerator) through software provisioning only