Infinera And DANTE Set World Record For Multi-Terabit Network Provisioning

Optical connectivity specialist Infinera and pan-European academic and research network provider DANTE have set a Guinness World Record for the fastest provisioning of long-haul multi-Terabit transmission capacity on a live network.

The two organisations set up an 8 Tbps (terabit per second) optical connection between Amsterdam and Hamburg in just 19 minutes and one second. That’s enough capacity to transmit 1.6 million HD movies in each direction simultaneously, over a distance of 531 km (329 miles).

The record was achieved on GÉANT, Europe’s largest research and education network. It fits into a completely new Guinness World Record category, which means no one has attempted such a feat before.

Fat pipes

According to Infinera, the total capacity of the Internet in 2005 stood at 8 Tbps. On Tuesday, the two organisations managed to provide this much capacity over existing fibre cables in under 20 minutes, using Infinera’s Intelligent Transport Network, which features the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform.

DTN-X provides transmission capacity using long-haul 500 Gbps super-channel line cards based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which require only two fibre connectors each.

During the record attempt, sixteen such cards and 32 fibre connections were deployed at each end of the link. Once the super-channels were in operation, a 100 Gigabit Ethernet service was provisioned over the link.

Infinera says it would take its competitors at least 160 line cards and 320 fibre connections to achieve a similar level of capacity. If this is true, since the record was timed from the insertion of the first super-channel line card to the activation of the network, it might remain uncontested for a while.

In the future, the company’s 500 Gbps PICs will be upgraded to offer one Terabit super-channel capacity.

“We know that service providers are facing increasing capacity demands at a multi-Terabit scale,” said Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions and Technology at Infinera, and leader of the record-breaking team. “Our ability to turn up a full eight Tbps of capacity in less than 20 minutes clearly demonstrates the superiority of the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network in meeting those challenges, allowing service providers to use time as a weapon to increase revenue.”

Earlier this year, a team of academics form Germany had set a new world record for wireless connectivity, transmitting data over the air using ultra-high frequency of 240 GHz and achieving speeds of 40 Gbps.

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