Ciena breaks 800G distance record

Applications and Research

Ciena has broken the record for the longest 800G transmission, according to a report on the company’s website. Helen Xenos, Ciena’s senior director, portfolio marketing, writing on the company website, said the company turned up an 800G wavelength from Toronto to Quebec City across a ‘world record-breaking’ 970km distance, 20km further than Infinera’s recent test in March 2020. The test was carried out on Telus’ network between Toronto to Montreal, the highest bandwidth corridor in Canada, connecting the two largest cities in the country across approximately 700km, however, the link was successfully extended by another 270km to Quebec City.

TELUS is one of the early 800G technology adopters who is in the process of augmenting their network with Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e). TELUS supports 15.3 million customer connections spanning wireless, data, IP, voice, television, entertainment, video and security..

“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

The TELUS network extends 6,000 km from Victoria, British Columbia to Halifax, Nova Scotia. TELUS’s optical network consists of a colourless, directionless, contentionless, flexible grid (CDC-F) ROADM architecture with Layer 0 Control Plane, designed to support reliable, fast turn-up and re-route of unpredictable bandwidth demands across the network. Furthermore, it is ready to support new innovations in optical technologies as they become available, including the ability to carry optical channels of any spectrum size across the fibre.  This fully flexible, intelligent photonic infrastructure allows for the simple addition of WL5e wavelengths and with that, access to significant cost, footprint, and power benefits. TELUS will be standardising WaveLogic 5 Extreme for deployment in the near future. Part of the standardization activities include testing the full capabilities of the product to plan end user service offerings.

For more information, visit www.ciena.com