Infinera Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA, a vertically integrated manufacturer of digital optical transport networking systems incorporating its own indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), says that its portfolio of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) platforms has been validated over the white-box optical line system of Lumentum Holdings Inc of Milpitas, CA, USA, which manufactures optical and photonic products for optical networks and commercial lasers.
Infinera now offers customers an open optical networking solution validated by interoperability testing between Lumentum's white-box optical line system and Infinera's Intelligent Transport Networks.
The joint solution supports an ecosystem that enables open networks for data-center interconnect (DCI) and metro/edge WDM transport. It is said that this announcement by Infinera and Lumentum marks the first multi-vendor driven demonstration of, and commitment to supporting, an open, interoperable and agile approach to the construction of transport networks. The combined power of Infinera's PIC-based platforms and Lumentum's white-box line system offers network operators a scalable, programmable and automated solution for provisioning bandwidth using open standardized interfaces.
Infinera and Lumentum are collaborating on open packet optical transport in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an industry initiative co-founded by Facebook. TIP consists of multiple operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators and others collaborating to develop new technologies and approaches to deploy the telecom network infrastructure.
"By validating the industry's first white-box open line system interoperability with Lumentum, Infinera has demonstrated our commitment to delivering the innovative and open optical solutions that our customers need," says Infinera's CEO Tom Fallon. "This announcement is yet another step in the path to delivering on our vision of enabling an infinite pool of intelligent bandwidth that the next communications infrastructure is built upon," he adds.
"Lumentum's award-winning optical white boxes are designed for simplicity and scalability, with open interfaces to enable software-defined networking (SDN)," says Lumentum's CEO Alan Lowe. "The demonstration of successful interoperability with Infinera validates the open system approach that should deliver the simplicity and service innovation many network operators desire."
The extensive interoperability testing included Infinera's XTM Series, Cloud Xpress Family and DTN-X Family (including XTC and XT Series) platforms. In addition, the companies successfully conducted interoperability testing of Infinera's next generation Infinite Capacity Engine pilot hardware. The Infinera platforms interoperated with the Lumentum white-box open line system including the 20-port Transport ROADM (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer). The test cases covered point-to-point metro fiber links carrying multiple modulations including QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying), 8QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) and 16QAM with PIC-based super-channels over the Lumentum open line system. The test was able to fill the fiber to full capacity at QPSK, 8QAM and 16QAM data rates via 19 super-channels injected into a single rack unit 20-port ROADM. A fully loaded solution achieves up to 24 terabits of fiber capacity using the Infinite Capacity Engine at 16QAM. The testing successfully validated standard optical parameters including optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) for seamless performance over metro distances.
