Comcast and Ciena on Tuesday said they completed a live field trial of a 1Terabit/sec (Tb/s) optical transmission spanning nearly 1,000 km, showing the ability to increase the traffic carrying capacity by 2.5 times.
The trial showed how Comcast’s existing fiber network can scale to keep pace with the bandwidth demands of cloud computing, video, and multimedia applications, as well as data center connectivity.
The 1Tb/s trial took place during the first week of October over Comcast’s existing long-haul fiber infrastructure connecting Ashburn, Va. to Charlotte, N.C.
This is said to be the first trial in which live data traffic was carried over a 1Tb/s 16QAM super-channel on an existing, commercial network. At the same time, that network was also carrying customer traffic over 10G, 40G and 100G wavelengths, all coexisting on a mix of flexible and 50GHz-spacedfixed grid channels.
The 1Tb/s trial used Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform solution that combined flexible grid Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM) with 16QAM coherent modulation to achieve 5b/s/Hz of spectral efficiency over a distance of nearly 1,000 km of uncompensated ELEAF fiber.
“We continue to work with Ciena to leverage our already installed Ciena 6500 platforms to deliver more content, faster Internet speeds and enable new cloud-based applications for our customers,” said Steve Surdam executive director, Network Engineering at Comcast Cable.