Huawei touts 320-Tbps centralized optical switching WDM prototype

Huawei used this week's Mobile World Congress to show off a 320 Tbps centralized all-optical switching WDM prototype optical crossconnect. The 320-Tbps switching capacity is 12X to 16X the capacity of traditional Optical Transport Network (OTN) crossconnects, but uses one-thousandth the power of traditional OTN switching, Huawei asserts.

The communications systems vendor expects OXCs of this scale to become necessary for data center interconnect applications at "supercore sites." The all-optical design promotes significantly lower installation, operation, and maintenance costs, Huawei believes.

The OXC prototype uses an NxN centralized switching architecture and provides 1+1 optical crossconnect protection capabilities. Its colorless, directionless, and contentionless capabilities enable topology-independent all-optical switching, Huawei says.

The company did not say when or if the prototype would be commercialized.

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