MTN and Huawei complete field trial in South Africa
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MTN and Huawei complete field trial in South Africa

South Africa's MTN and Chinese vendor Huawei have completed a successful live trial of a transport SDN and 2.4Tbps WDM system.

The trial, carried out on MTN’s national fibre backbone network in South Africa, is claimed to be the fastest and most intelligent optical network in the industry to date.

The first phase of 2.4Tbps with 16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) was achieved over a 300km transmission distance, and the second phase saw 2Tbps with QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) achieved over a distance of 1,031km.

“With this successful field trial, we have demonstrated our commitment to digital innovation,” said Navi Naidoo, group technology officer at MTN.

“We believe that networks such as cloud computing, streaming media and mobile broadband must be scalable, intelligent and flexible… to this end, Huawei’s next-generation optical evolution concept properly fits our requirements.”

The trial demonstrated capacities far beyond the existing 100G technology, and features of what is claimed to be the world’s first transport SDN.

Huawei’s transport SDN solutions have enabled transmission pipe virtualisation, allowing traditional communication technology network to be “IT-like”, with features such as bandwidth on demand, virtual transport services and automatic O&M functions.

"Huawei will maintain co-operation and joint innovation with MTN, and continue to promote the commercialisation process of SDN and ultra-high-speed optical transmission technology, in order to jointly meet the challenges of a digital future," said Zha Jun, president of Huawei's fixed network business unit.

Earlier this month, Huawei completed a successful LTE trial using unlicensed spectrum, in partnership with NTT DoCoMo.

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