Infinera And GlobalConnect Complete 400G Field Trial In Oslo

Companies demo 400Gbps coherent transmission over a 50GHz fixed grid metro transport network with pre-existing 10G channels

Infinera and GlobalConnect, a digital infrastructure provider in Northern Europe, have completed a field trial demonstrating 400 gigabits per second (400G) coherent transmission over a 50 gigahertz (GHz) fixed grid metro transport network concurrently with pre-existing 10G channels. The field trial was carried out over a live optical link in the Oslo metropolitan area.

The industry-first field trial showed GlobalConnect's ability to scale its current optical transport network to meet growing capacity demands while preserving its investment in deployed infrastructure with optical technology from Infinera.

Following a merger with Broadnet, the GlobalConnect open fibre infrastructure spans over 42,000 km and provides the foundation for a wide range of carrier-class services for wholesale and corporate customers.

The field trial featured the coherent transmission capabilities of the Infinera Groove G30 Compact Modular Platform and its interoperability with deployed metro transport infrastructure. The error-free testing included multiple 300G and 400G alien wavelength transmission use cases over a live metro network link originally designed for and currently running 10G wavelengths using on-off keying (OOK) modulation technology. The field trial showed the ability to boost the capacity of a 10G-engineered OOK-based network by going from 10G to 400G per wavelength, thus increasing the fibre capacity to 32 terabits on an existing 50 gigahertz (GHz) fixed grid metro network.

“With the explosive growth in data traffic and acceleration of digital transformation, optical network flexibility and scalability remain critical to our ability to be responsive to our customers' evolving communications needs,” said Anders Kuhn Saaby, CTO, GlobalConnect. “We remain committed to advancing our fibre infrastructure with cutting-edge technologies to keep pace with growing capacity demands and allow us to expand our addressable market.”

“We were pleased to work with GlobalConnect to showcase the state-of-the-art performance of our Groove G30 compact modular solution,” said Glenn Laxdal, senior VP of Disaggregated, Edge, and Access Solutions at Infinera. “This solution helps network operators eliminate the technology roadblocks to seamless scaling of conventional 10G network infrastructure to cost-effectively meet higher-capacity customer demands.”