Infinera sets record with 30Tbps trans-Atlantic capacity and 700Gbps wavelength
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Infinera sets record with 30Tbps trans-Atlantic capacity and 700Gbps wavelength

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Infinera has successfully completed a subsea network field trial over the MAREA trans-Atlantic cable with its ICE6 optical engine.

The results of trial yielded some ground-breaking results both hero result, which has no additional deployment margin, and the deployable result, where there is allocated margin to allow real services to be deployed at this data rate or with this total capacity.

Overall, the hero result, over 6,640km achieved 30Tbps of total capacity on a single fibre pair and 700Gbps data rate per wavelength. While the deployable results over 6,640km achieved 28Tbps of total capacity on a single fibre pair and up to 650Gbps data rate per wavelength.

In an interview with Infinera’s, Geoff Bennett, director of solutions marketing, Dr Steve Grubb, global network optical architect at Facebook explained the difference between a hero value and a deployable value.

“Submarine networks have a long tradition of pushing the boundaries of optical performance, which then spills over to terrestrial network performance. So, it’s normal to include data rate or capacity results that are right on the edge of the forward error correction (FEC) limit – in other words, it’s error-free transmission but an operator would not normally feel comfortable operating services under those conditions. So, the capacity of 30Tbps and the per-wavelength data rate of 700Gbps are both hero numbers, representing the upper bound of this innovative technology,” said Grubb.

“What we’re able to do with ICE6 is dial in the right set of performance parameters to allow our compensation algorithms – whether it’s the FEC, or the DBA, or our nonlinear algorithms – all of that flexibility is what allows us to push right up against the Shannon limit,” added Dr Pierre Mertz, Infinera fellow and submarine networking engineer.

To see more details of the record trials, take a look at the following video: 

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