Telstra Runs 1.6Tbps Fibre Trial Between Melbourne And Canberra
Telstra says that it has successfully achieved 1.6Tbps through a single optical channel over 700km.
The trial was conducted with Ericsson and ran alongside live traffic services across the central Telstra InfraCo fibre route between Melbourne and Canberra – which is reported to be one of the highest-capacity routes in Australia.
Telstra claims that the successful trial is a world-first milestone – it is believed to be 200km longer than the previous record for the highest capacity on a single wavelength.
The trial used Ciena’s WL6e, which uses 3nm silicon technology and reportedly doubles Telstra’s existing fibre wavelength capacity from 800Gbps to 1.6Tbps.
Telstra says it will use this tech to support 800G connectivity across long-haul infrastructure, and integrate it as part of the Telstra InfraCo intercity fibre network.
“To put this trial into perspective, 1.6Tb/s of bandwidth through a single wavelength is the same bandwidth as over 300,000 Netflix HDs streams going at the same time. Or you can download 17PB in a day which is more than 5 billion songs or over 12 billion photos. It is a 100 per cent increase per channel capacity and a 14.3 per cent increase in capacity per system,” said Sanjay Nayak, Telstra Fixed Engineering Executive.
Emilio Romeo, Head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, added, “By leveraging Ciena’s advanced 3nm chipset technology, we’ve successfully doubled the capacity of Telstra’s wavelengths, paving the way for more robust, high-capacity networks to support the ever-growing data demands.”
Internationally, companies have been undertaking similar trials. Last week, Nokia partnered with Greek operator group OTE for a field trial on the latter’s national dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) network, and they claim to have reached 800Gbps on a single channel over 2580 km and 900Gbps over 1290 km.
In July, China Telecom, along with others, launched the world’s first live single-wavelength 1.2Tbps hollow-core fibre transmission system with unidirectional capacity over 100Tbitps. It was deployed over a transmission distance of 20km in the live network of something called the All-Optical Network Technology and Application in the Intelligent Computing Era seminar of the CCSA TC618/NGOF.
Meanwhile Nokia and Frontier claimed to be the first in North America to trial broadband speeds of 100G, 50G, 25G, and 10G passive optical networks (PON) technologies at the same time on the latter’s existing network. That trial demonstrated how existing decades-old fibre can also be adapted for use with more modern technologies.