Nokia claims it has achieved the fastest ever data transmission speeds on fibre optic cable. Engineers from Nokia and mobile operator Orange France reported that a ‘faultless’ series of transmissions was achieved on the latter’s 914 km fibre optic network between Paris and Biarritz.
Orange France says it means it can now proceed with planned upgrades. Orange had originally helped to develop the prototype.
The trial tested the performance of Nokia’s fifth generation range of digital coherent optics (DCO), known as the PSE-Vs, to see if it supported end-to-end 400Gbps services across its network.
Higher data speeds over longer distances
The PSE-Vs have high-capacity transponders, packet-optical switches, disaggregated compact modular and subsea terminal platforms. They use a technique called generation probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) to make continuous baud rate adjustments in order to create higher wavelength capacities over longer distances.
This all means that theoretically they can achieve speeds of 400Gbps over any distance, using the spectrally efficient 100GHz WDM channels. These efficiencies would help them transmit at speed while cutting network costs and saving on power consumption.
This was the proving ground. Having successfully tested the circuit Orange can now proceed with a planned upgrade of its long-haul backbone networks to support new high-bandwidth 400 Gbps services. Engineers are now confident that Orange can expand its fibre capacity to 600Gbps. The network’s performance in the tests achieved a 50 per cent rise in spectral efficiency on capacity in its long-distance network.
Uses less power, runs faster
The trial was performed in real-world conditions using Nokia PSE-Vs super coherent optics in production-ready optical transport hardware. This comes 16 months after the first lab prototype trial was conducted on Orange’s live network.
The 914km Paris-Biarritz fibre circuit consisted of 13 spans of Orange’s existing network. It was run through multiple cascaded reconfigurable optical add/drop multipliers (ROADM), using 100GHz WDM spectrum channels.
Validating Nokia’ super coherent optics gives Orange spectral efficiency and network deployment options, according to Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Orange’s VP of international networks and services. In addition, it will cut the power consumption by half.
James Watt, head of Nokia’s optical networks division said Nokia was “delighted”.
