Infinera breaks industry record with 800G over 950km in live network trial

News and Business

Infinera has announced the successful completion of a live network trial of 800G single wavelength transmission at 96 Gbaud over 950 kilometres across a long-haul link in a major North American network operator’s production network.

Powered by Infinera’s sixth generation dual-800G Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE6) technology, this achievement signals a major industry milestone in driving down the cost per bit of telecommunications networks. The trial showcased the ability of Infinera’s 800G technology designed to enable network operators to rapidly and cost-effectively address the increasing capacity demands of new services such as 5G, enhanced broadband, and cloud-based business services. The trial follows the recent announcement that Infinera and Corning had delivered an 800Gbps single wavelength with Infinera’s sixth-generation Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE6) technology across 800 kilometres on Corning’s TXF® optical fibre under laboratory conditions.

Infinera’s SVP Marketing, Rob Shore (pictured), told Optical Connections, “Following the [earlier] trial, we realised we had a lot of extra margin. We were going to get more fibre from Corning but decided we had a great opportunity to demonstrate this performance on a live network. A lab trial is of course meaningful, but a trial of a live network is even more meaningful. Lots of customers are looking to do these demonstrations because they all want to prove that their networks are 800G-ready and that they’re going to be able to roll these services out to their customers quickly and themselves take advantage of the cost-effectiveness of these types of solutions. So we had no shortage of customers to choose from for our first live network trial.”

Conducted over a third-party optical line system carrying live multi-vendor traffic, the production network trial was implemented using Infinera’s Groove (GX) Series, equipped with an ICE6-based sled over industry-standard G.652 fibre. The results of the trial demonstrated the superior performance value of Infinera’s vertically integrated ICE6 optical engine, which features second-generation Nyquist subcarriers, 64QAM with per-subcarrier long codeword probabilistic constellation shaping, and per-subcarrier dynamic bandwidth allocation.

Shore added, “What this means is, anyone who has any network, anywhere, no matter which vendor’s equipment they built it with, that network using ICE6 is now 800G-ready and they can reach somewhere in the region of 900 kilometres. I think this is a really significant milestone for the idea of open disaggregated networks, where operators are not tied to a single vendor anymore.”

For more information, visit www.infinera.com