Orange and Nokia demo 600Gbps scaleability

Orange has confirmed plans to upgrade its long-haul backbone networks to support new high-bandwidth 400 Gbps services after a successful live trial using the Nokia PSE-Vs.

The French telecoms giant now has the ability to scale fibre capacity up to 600Gbps across its live network. The trial was performed on Nokia PSE-Vs fifth-generation super coherent optics in production-ready optical transport hardware. It demonstrated error-free performance at a data rate of 600Gbps over a 914km network between Paris and Biarritz, under what the duo described as “challenging live network conditions”.

The fibre network consisted of 13 spans of Orange’s existing network, through multiple cascaded reconfigurable optical add and drop multipliers using 100GHz wavelength division multiplying spectrum channels.

Jean-Luc Vuillemin, vice president of international networks at Orange, said: “With the booming market bandwidth requirement and need for scalability and flexibility, it is important that Orange continues to support an ever-greater network scale and new high-bandwidth services across our terrestrial and subsea global footprint.

“Validating super coherent optics with Nokia represents an important enabler for future-proof networks which will bring spectral efficiency and operational deployment flexibility to our customer solutions. Furthermore this technology will allow for power savings by nearly 50%, which is key to our objective of developing greener networks for our customers.”

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