Thursday, March 23, 2017

OFS Carries 200G over 4,500 km with TeraWave Fiber

OFS, a designer, manufacturer and supplier of fibre optic network products and solutions, announced it is showcasing the capacity and un-regenerated reach of Nokia's 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) C+L-band DWDM system over OFS TeraWave ULL fibre, enabling reduced cost-per-bit of transport across the ultra-long haul distances between hyper-scale data centres.

TeraWave ULL fibre is claimed to offer the largest available effective area for a terrestrial fibre, thereby allowing improved suppression of non-linear penalties that limit the reach of high capacity, coherent modulation formats. The company also claims that the cost-per-bit of fully lighting a TeraWave ULL fibre can be up to 50% less than that of a G.652 fibre through avoiding the need for regeneration.


The Nokia 1830 PSS networking platform is designed to support ultra-long haul performance at 200 Gbit/s using the 8QAM modulation format, and extended metro/DCI reach with high spectral efficiency. The OFS TeraWave ULL ITU-T G.654.E fibre is designed to reduce amplifier noise leveraging low nominal loss of 0.168 dB/km and to minimise non-linear distortion via its large effective area of 125 microns squared.

OFS noted that the waveguide of TeraWave ULL fibre was designed to minimise both micro- and macro-bending losses in the L-band to enable enhanced terrestrial cable performance and superior splice performance.

For extended reach metro/DCI applications, the TeraWave ULL fibre can support 400 Gbit/s capacity over up to 300 km with 100 km spans without the need for Raman amplification when used with the Nokia 1830 platform. When combined with a hybrid Raman-EDFA amplifier, the fibre can support up to 200 Gbit/s transport over distances of up to 4,500 km un-regenerated with 100 km spans.

Commenting on the demonstration, Robert Lingle, Jr., director, market and technology strategy at OFS, said, "Traffic is growing inside the networks of cloud content providers at CAGRs up to 50%, while the distance between web-scale data centres can be over 4,000 km in Europe and North America… as practical and fundamental limits make it more difficult to increase spectral efficiency in the future, C+L-band transmission (can)… double the capacity per fibre if the fibre and cable are designed for L-band wavelengths".

http://www.ofsoptics.com/index.html