Infinera Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA, a vertically integrated manufacturer of digital optical network systems incorporating its own indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), and DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), an operator of advanced networks for research and education, have achieved a Guinness World Record for the fastest rate of multi-Terabit optical capacity across the GéANT Network.
Infinera and DANTE were able to install and activate eight Terabits per second (Tb/s) of long haul super-channel optical capacity, enough capacity to simultaneously stream 1.6 million high-definition movies in each direction. This capacity was activated across the GéANT production network in 19 minutes and 1 second after plugging in the first line card.
The record was set using an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network, featuring the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform, deployed on the GéANT backbone across a long distance link from Vancis Amsterdam, The Netherlands to GlobalConnect Hamburg, Germany.
"Working with Infinera to achieve the Guinness World Record for fastest provisioning of long-haul transmission capacity on a live network is consistent with our day-to-day experience operating an Intelligent Transport Network," says DANTE's chief technology officer Michael Enrico. "Infinera provides the easy-to-deploy multi-Terabit capacity we need to rapidly scale GéANT, Europe's largest research and education network."
The DTN-X platform provides transmission capacity using 500 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) super-channel line cards which require only two fiber connectors each. Sixteen such cards and 32 fiber connections were deployed at each end of the link, and once the super-channels were in operation a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) service was provisioned over the link. The total time from the insertion of the first super-channel line card to the activation of the 100GbE service was 19 minutes and 1 second resulting in a provisioning rate of 26.02Tb/s per hour.
One of the independent observers for the test was Wolf Pueschner, previously the senior VP for Deutsche Telekom's Global Network Factory, and now an independent telecommunications consultant in Germany.
"Many companies still make the mistake of underestimating the value of a network's ease of operation when selecting a vendor," says Pueschner. "Operators that are best prepared in a highly competitive environment differentiate with solutions that are easy to operate and can quickly turn up services. Transport solutions like Infinera Intelligent Transport Network is a way to win business. This was an unprecedented demonstration, and extremely impressive."
The test was completed using the Infinera DTN-X platform which delivers the industry's only production ready long haul 500Gb/s FlexCoherent super-channels based on 500Gb/s PICs, engineered to be upgradeable to one Terabit super-channels in the future. The DTN-X converges five Terabits of non-blocking OTN switching into the same platform, resulting in much more efficient network utilization when compared to conventional WDM architectures, says the firm.
