Test Report

Infinera and DANTE establish a Guinness World Record

Long distance optical transmission forms the foundation of the modern internet, and the ability to respond to unexpected surges in demand is a key requirement for a modern optical transmission system. Service Providers are facing traffic growth and need to turn up more capacity faster than ever while simultaneously reducing costs. In 2012 super-channels were introduced to the market by Infinera to address these issues. Super channels behave as a single unit of bandwidth, are brought into service in a single operational cycle, and therefore allow service providers to scale operations without scaling costs. Furthermore, GMPLS based service provisioning automates operations helping customers reduce time to turn-up links. Today several dozen customers have already deployed super-channels and GMPLS; this test proves that they can use these next generation transmission technologies to provision multi-terabits of optical capacity in world record time on a production network link of several hundred kilometers. In this test 8.25 Tb/s of capacity is activated using 16 x 500G super-channel line cards and 32 fiber connectors at each end of the link on DANTE’s GÉANT network. In contrast, conventional solutions available today support 100 Gb/s per card and therefore would require a total of 160 line cards and 320 fiber connectors to be installed.