Transmode earns 100G kudos with customer in Finland, field trials in Sweden

Packet-optical networking company Transmode Systems AB has announced several new 100G deployments in metro and regional fiber-optic networks. This includes customer orders from North America and deployments in Finland with FNE-Finland Oy.

Transmode says it is making considerable progress with its metro and regional 100G product. The company has received first customer orders for the new product from an unidentified North American network operator and has been selected for a 100G rollout by FNE-Finland, one of the country’s alternative backbone capacity providers.

FNE-Finland was founded by a group of local telecommunications companies to provide a common backbone network for the group and has since expanded to sell capacity to a broad range of external customers. Since 2011 the company has built a national ROADM-based flexible optical network using Transmode’s TM-Series.

In December 2012, FNE-Finland conducted live traffic field trials, including 100G transmission over an 800-km link, to demonstrate that its network is 100G-ready and can support all-optical 100G connectivity between any two locations in their network. FNE-Finland plans to start rolling out 100G capacity across the network using equipment from Transmode. Transmode is supported locally in the project with FNE-Finland by Finnish systems integrator ACC Systems.

Timo Hopponen FNE-Finland’s technical director said, "We are proud to be offering the first 100G capacity and wholesale services to our customers within Finland with any-to-any all-optical 100G connectivity across the network. We are extremely pleased with the performance of Transmode’s 100G solution over our installed network. The solution is also very easy to add to the network so we are now readily able to add 100G as we need to, at any location.”

In addition to these first customer network deployments, Transmode has also performed multiple customer lab/network trials, including a deployment in the Acreo national research network in Sweden. The Acreo network deployment was over 1600 km and involved transmission over both Transmode’s TM-Series and a third-party WDM system using an alien wavelength with optical handoff between the two systems.

Anders Berntson, department manager at Acreo Swedish ICT said, “We are very pleased to have been able to test 100G over our network, especially over such a long distance with a metro/regional optimized system. Using transmission equipment from both Transmode and another vendor we have also demonstrated that this technology is well suited to environments where new 100G technology needs to work with existing deployments from many vendors without the cost of optical-electrical-optical regeneration between different vendors’ systems.”

Sten Nordell, Transmode’s chief technology officer, added, “100G technology has now reached the level of maturity where it makes much more sense in metro and regional networks and is ready for wide-scale deployment. Using PM-QPSK coding and coherent detection in a solution that is built around metro and regional applications has enabled Transmode to bring a unique solution to the market that addresses the specific needs of these deployments. Naturally we are extremely pleased by the interest in this product and by the relative ease at which customers can add 100G to existing deployments of Transmode and third party equipment.”

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