In a blog posted yesterday, Ciena (NYSE:CIEN) revealed that it was able to transmit an 800-Gbps signal 970 km during a field trial with Canadian service provider TELUS. The distance is the longest reported for an 800G field trial on a production network this year, surpassing the 950 km Infinera reported earlier this year (see “Infinera sends 800G over 950 km in live network, touts increased appeal of 800G”).
The demonstration, of course, leveraged Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent transmission engine (see “Ciena touts WaveLogic 5 for 800-Gbps coherent transmission”). “TELUS will be standardizing WaveLogic 5 Extreme for deployment in the near future,” writes Helen Xenos, senior director, portfolio marketing for Ciena, in the blog. The demonstration targeted TELUS’s link between Toronto and Montreal, which Xenos said is the route with the highest bandwidth demand in Canada. That route runs approximately 700 km; to extend the demonstration further, Ciena and TELUS added a 270-km link to Quebec City to the run. The exact length was 971.2 km, Xenos reported.
With the demonstration completed and plans to deploy the WaveLogic 5 Extreme capabilities in the near term, the stage should soon be set for TELUS to add 800G capabilities when it desires. “800G will be deployed where it makes sense in the TELUS network,” Xenos wrote. “As has always been the case, the line rate capacity that will be deployed depends on specific link characteristics, number of channels, and desired reserved margin by the operator.”
TELUS runs a nationwide fiber backbone network of 6,000 km from Victoria, British Columbia, to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It leverages colorless, directionless, contentionless, and flexible-grid (CDC-F) ROADMs with a Layer 0 Control Plane. “TELUS prides itself on having one of the world’s fastest networks and using industry-leading technology to deliver the best experience for our customers across Canada. Our collaboration with Ciena on breaking transmission records is an exciting innovation that speaks to both teams track records of success,” said Ken Nowakowski, director planning and engineering, Transport and IP Infrastructure Development and Operations at TELUS, as quoted in the blog.
In addition to the 800G transmission, the two companies confirmed the ability of the TELUS network to accommodate 400 Gigabit Ethernet traffic.
Ciena remains first and only to market with 800G capabilities. Infinera has conducted a series of long-distance trials of its ICE6 Infinite Capacity Engine, with an emphasis on longer reaches than Ciena and others had reported. The fact that Ciena has now set a new distance record would appear to confirm that operators will have a choice of vendors if such reaches are required.
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