Apollo and Alcatel-Lucent trial reaches 7.2Tbps capacity
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Apollo and Alcatel-Lucent trial reaches 7.2Tbps capacity

Subsea cable provider Apollo and Alcatel-Lucent have achieved transmissions of 7.2Tbps of data per fibre pair in a field trial on the existing Apollo South route.

The Apollo South system connects France to the US, and the trial utilised the French vendor’s 100G technology.

The trial demonstrated a nine-fold increase in the system’s original design capability, which is thought to be a new capacity record on an upgrade project.

“Proving the maximum capacity of 7.2Tbps per fibre pair has clarified what we expected to be the case, that Apollo could carry around four times the entire Atlantic traffic in use today on all cables,” said Richard Elliot, managing director at Apollo. “This cable system, which has proved to be the most reliable Atlantic system ever by a long way, has massive expansion capability, leaving it well placed for the foreseeable future.”

Alcatel-Lucent deployed detection and advanced error technology during the demonstration, as well as pulse-shaping schemes to counteract any signal distortions or noise that could impact performance.

“This field trial showcased the adaptability of Alcatel-Lucent’s technology to offer carriers a smart evolution path for tuning capacity and performance throughout the life of a system,” said Philippe Dumont, president of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks. “In combination with high resiliency to potential degradation at higher speeds, our technology offers a cost-effective and flexible networking model to cope with end-users’ service demands.”

Alcatel-Lucent was vendor of choice for the upgrade of both the Apollo South and Apollo North systems in May 2014.

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