Infinera announced the completion of a submarine field trial with a major subsea network provider over a modern trans-Atlantic route that involved the Infinera XTS-3300 meshponder and demonstrated the potential to support 19 Tbit/s per fibre pair, achieving what it claimed is the highest spectral efficiency on a trans-Atlantic route with stable, commercial-ready performance margin.
Infinera's XTS-3300 leverages its new Infinera Infinite Capacity Engine 4 (ICE4) and comprises part of the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network portfolio optimised for long-haul subsea applications. The new meshponder delivers the performance of Infinera's ICE4 technology, including enhanced pre- and post-dispersion compensation, digitally synthesised Nyquist subcarriers and soft-decision forward error correction (FEC) gain sharing.
The trial over the trans-Atlantic link was designed to validate ICE4's transmission of 8QAM 600 Gbit/s super-channel in 140 GHz of spectrum, delivering what is claimed to be the highest spectral efficiency of 4.3 bits per second, per hertz together with commercial-ready performance margin.The ICE4-based Infinera DTN-X XT Series and XTS Series are expected to be generally availability later in the quarter. Infinera's Cloud Xpress 2 platform, also based on ICE4, began shipping in the second quarter of 2017.
Commenting on the field trial, Andrew Schmitt, lead analyst at Cignal AI, said, "While optical vendors have demonstrated experimental approaches to boost subsea fibre capacity, the Infinera XTS-3300 is the first commercial platform to deliver over 19 Tbit/s capacity on a trans-Atlantic route… the XTS-3300 trial used tighter channel spacing and advanced compensation techniques in the DSP".
- Infinera unveiled its Infinite Capacity Engine, a multi-terabit optical subsystem in 2016, combining its next generation FlexCoherent Processor and the photonics of its fourth generation photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The technology enables optical super-channel capacity of up to 2.4 Tbit/s and reach up to 12,000 km in a single compact package.
- The solution also features Advanced Coherent Toolkit (ACT), providing a claimed 60% more capacity-reach performance for submarine and terrestrial networks versus current generation optical technologies.
