Summer 2020 - Optical Connections Magazine

ROB SHORE INFINERA Q&A

Infinera has made a number of significant announcements over the last few months, from the launch of its XR optics technology in September 2019 to achieving 800G over a live 950km network, the latter following a lab trial over 800km. Optical Connections editor Peter Dykes spoke to Infinera’s SVP Marketing Rob Shore about the significance of these announcements and likely future developments. THE VIEW FROM INFINERA GOING THE DISTANCE

Why did Infinera decide to do a 800G trial over a live network?

accomplished with some clever coordination between the amplifiers, the line system and the transponders, or some kind of ideal network configuration; this was just a live operation, carrying live traffic on another vendor’s optical line system that was carrying other vendor’s traffic. We just put our wavelength on top of it and off it went. What it says is anyone who has virtually any long-haul network, anywhere, irrespective of which vendor’s equipment they built it with, that network using ICE6 is now 800G-ready over a distance of around 950 kilometre

This is building off everything we did with ICE4. Because we’re highly vertically integrated, we

OC

RS

don’t have to rely on third-party vendors as much as some other vendors. This enables us to have more control over the innovation process and holistically co-design both components. With high-end optical solutions, it’s not just about being smart – it’s about being creative. It’s about coming up with those ideas, techniques and solutions that other people haven’t thought of. One example is our pioneering use of Nyquist subcarriers which demonstrated significant advantages in ICE4. Simply by using subcarriers we were able to transmit high bit rate signals while staying in the sweet spot of optical transmission of 8-11 Gbaud. The result, with ICE4, was a 200G-based solution with significantly better performance than other technologies from that same generation. We learned a lot from our experience of Nyquist subcarriers with ICE4. And after four years or so, having the opportunity to play with them and really understand the potential, we were able to leverage much more effectively with ICE6. We added things like per-subcarrier probabilistic constellation shaping and dynamic bandwidth allocation, which makes it possible to dynamically change

In the earlier demo in our labs, we used 800 kilometres of Corning’s low loss TXF fibre. It’s something

RS

we’ve been working on for quite a while and we always thought we’d have pretty good performance. However, when we closed that link, we realised we had a significant amount of extra margin. While we were waiting for additional fibre from Corning for another trial, we decided this was a great opportunity to demonstrate this performance on a live network. A lab trial is of course meaningful, but a trial on a live network is far more so. Lots of customers are looking to do these demonstrations because they all want to prove that their networks are 800G ready. So, we had no shortage of customers to choose from when we wanted to do our first live network trial, but we wanted to choose a distance that we thought we could reach and would also be meaningful. We found the ideal customer with a typical long-haul network with a link that was just over 950km. We were actually able to close the link at 800G and with some margin to spare. The coolest thing about it was, this was a third-party network and wasn’t an Infinera line system. It wasn’t

OC How significant do you think this trial is?

I think this is a very significant milestone for the idea of open, disaggregated networks, where

RS

operators are not tied to a single vendor anymore. I know that other vendors have transponders that work on any line system, but I’m doubtful that anyone is going to get anywhere near the performance that we achieved, and with open networking, anyone can have access to this technology.

How were you able to get such great performance?

OC

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| ISSUE 21 | Q3 2020

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