EXATEL trials Huawei single-carrier 400G WDM platform

Huawei says it has teamed with Polish telecommunications service provider EXATEL to successfully field trial the systems vendor’s single-carrier 400G WDM platform on a live G.652-based fiber-optic network in Warsaw.

The single-carrier system is an industry first, Huawei asserts. Current 400-Gbps either use a pair of 200-Gbps subcarriers or aggregate multiple subcarriers with capacity less than 200 Gbps into a single superchannel. Huawei says it has applied a compensation technology that it calls “Faster Than Nyquist,” along with proprietary clock recovery technology and adaptive soft-decision forward error correction (FEC), to enable the use of a single carrier that overcomes the signal distortion and unstable clocks 400G signals typically experience.

A single-channel approach would lead to lower cost, as the use of a single transceiver would lead to higher integration and availability as well as lower power consumption than current approaches, Huawei says. Management and scheduling of wavelengths also would be simplified, the company adds.

The company did not say whether the system is a prototype or commercially available.

"In order to guide the evolution to the next-generation optical network, Huawei invests a lot on the research of 400G technologies. We look forward to cooperating with more leading operators in the research to gain more achievements," says Jack Wang, president of the Transport Network Product Line of Huawei.

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