13 October 2011

Pacific Crossing and Infinera complete first transpacific 100 Gigabit subsea trial

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 Pacific Crossing, a subsidiary of Japan’s NTT Communications Corp that owns and operates the 21,000km PC-1 transpacific submarine fiber-optic network ring, have completed a 100Gb/s subsea trial. The subsea trial spanned more than 9500km on Pacific Crossing’s PC-1 fiber from California to Japan. This is claimed to be the first and longest 100Gb/s trial performed across the Pacific delivering digital coherent transmission.

Infinera claims that the trial demonstrates the unique ability to deliver two industry firsts. The 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) demo was the first transmission of a 100GbE client service carried across the Pacific using 40Gb/s optical channels with Infinera’s FlexCoherent transmission. The success of the trial was based on Infinera’s commercially available 40Gb/s optical line module and 100GbE client interface on the firm’s DTN platform. The second demonstration was the first realization of a 100Gb/s optical channel using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) with soft-decision forward error correction (SD FEC), which will be available in the future on Infinera’s DTN-X platform. The firm says that its FlexCoherent technology enables service providers to optimize transmission performance across a range of applications using multiple software-programmable modulation formats. Infinera recently announced the availability of new DTN capabilities and the new DTN-X platform featuring both PIC-based super-channels and FlexCoherent transmission.

The Asia Pacific region has been experiencing exponential growth in Internet bandwidth demand, notes Infinera. According to the Internet World Stats web-site, the number of Internet users in Asia grew from 114 million in 2000 to 922 million in 2011. The growth is forecast to continue, driving the need for subsea networking equipment that can deliver the required capacity.

“Customer demand for transpacific bandwidth continues to grow,” says Pacific Crossing’s CEO Takahiro Sumimoto. “We are delighted to work with Infinera to demonstrate 100 Gigabit transmission on our existing subsea fiber plant,” he adds.

“It [the trial] marks a major milestone for the delivery of next-generation optical systems in the Asia Pacific region,” believes Deryck Robinson, Infinera’s VP, Subsea business unit. “We are committed to support the Asia Pacific region and believe this trial demonstrates the scale, simplicity and efficiency of Infinera’s solutions to provide a glimpse of what the network will be.”

Infinera recently completed trials of 100Gb/s and 500Gb/s super-channels across the globe with SEACOM in Africa and Interoute in Europe. Underscoring its commitment to providing enhanced levels of service and support for customers in the Asia Pacific region, Infinera also recently opened an office in Hong Kong with a customer demonstration center and a training center for its growing client base in the region.

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