ANAHEIM-- Verizon Business is increasing the capacity of its ultralong-haul backbone network from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s in some inter-city segments this year. And it already has plans in place to begin trialing 100-Gb/s links in 18 months.

In this year’s second quarter, the carrier will upgrade the link between New York, N.Y., and Washington D.C., to 40 Gb/s, bringing other network segments up to speed throughout the year.

“We need our vendors to help us implement 100 Gb/s much sooner than we originally anticipated,” said Fred Briggs, Verizon Business’ executive vice president of network operations and technology, in a statement issued by Verizon. “Once we implement 40 Gb/s, 100 Gb/s will be on our doorstep.”

Verizon began trialing 40-Gb/s links in early 2004 (when it was still MCI), using equipment from Cisco Systems, Ciena and Mintera on long-haul links to the West Coast.

Separately this week, optical subsystem vendor CoreOptics demonstrated a 111-Gb/s transmission over 2400 km as part of a technical trial conducted with Siemens Networks.

Also this week, Verizon Communications revealed that it has begun construction on a transpacific network that it expects to turn up in the third quarter of 2008. That network will span over 18,000 kilometers and have an initial capacity of 1.28 terabits per second.