21 January 2013

Infinera and Telstra Global demonstrate SD-FEC over 4,200km

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), has announced the first successful demonstration of a 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) optical signal enhanced with Soft Decision Forward Error Correction (SD-FEC) across Telstra Global’s dedicated fibre pair within Segment S5 of AAG Hawaii to California submarine cable.

The subsea trial was performed over Telstra Global’s dedicated fibre pair within Segment 5 of the AAG cable, connecting San Luis Obispo in Southern California to the island of Oahu in Hawaii and spanning 4,200 km across the Pacific. The trial was staged using Infinera’s DTN-X platform and a prototype super-channel line card enabled with Infinera’s 3rd generation FlexCoherent Processor for real time SD-FEC processing combined with the industry’s only 500 Gb/s PICs, says the firm.

Using the additional error recovery capability enabled by the SD-FEC, multiple Infinera FlexCoherent modulation formats were able to close this link with no bit errors detected. The SD-FEC enabled higher order modulation formats to be used which could allow Telstra to increase the available capacity on this link increasing the commercial life of the cable in the face of aggressive increases in internet demand. A key characteristic of FlexCoherent technology is that the line card can be configured for a specific modulation format via simple software controls. 

Infinera co-founder and chief strategy officer, Dr. David Welch said, “We are pleased to see that our 3rd generation FlexCoherent Processor along with 500 Gb/s PICs, is performing exceptionally in real world environments. Over the past few months we’ve shown that a PIC-based long haul super-channel implementation can deal with record-breaking levels of PMD impairments in fiber; deliver a full 8Tb/s of capacity on Dispersion Shifted Fiber that service providers might have written off as useless, and now with Telstra’s help we’ve shown that with the addition of SD-FEC, this technology is capable of being deployed on some of the longest and most challenging cable routes in the world.”

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