Telefonica Espana takes 400G for a test drive

Multiple newspapers in Spain report that Telefónica España has tested DWDM channel speeds of 400 Gbps on a live fiber-optic network.

The route selected for the field trial was between the neighboring cities of Granada and Jaén with a distance of 140 km between nodes. There is an intermediate optical amplifier in Alcalá la Real (Jaén) creating two hops of 66 and 74 km. To increase the distance of the experiment, traffic was looped back at the node in Jaén to yield a total distance of 280 km.

The tests were carried out to check the feasibility of using 400-Gbps channels on systems already carrying live customer traffic, and to demonstrate that Telefónica’s network will be able to support very high-speed traffic needs in the future. However, reports say the operator doesn’t anticipate installing such links on a commercial basis until 2013 at the earliest.

Telefónica is in the process of upgrading its national network to a high-capacity photonic mesh, according to the papers. Ericsson is the supplier of Telefónica’s optical network, and its MHL 3000 platform was selected for the field trial. The operator had previously testing 100G channels using the same platform (see "Ericsson, Telefonica test 100 Gbps").

The tests took place between November 21 and December 4, 2011.

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