TIM (Telecom Italia), in partnership with Nokia, has achieved a wavelength speed of 550 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) for data transmission over a long-distance backbone network.
The trial covered more than 350 kilometres on TIM’s operational network between Rome and Florence using the new Nokia Photonic Service Engine 3.
TIM and Nokia also reached a transmission rate of 400 Gigabit/s over 900 kilometers between Rome and Milan, and 300 Gb/s over 1,750 kilometers.
The PSE-3 is the first coherent DSP to implement a sophisticated signal processing algorithm known as Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), which maximizes data transport capacity over any distance, Sam Bucci, head of Optical Networking at Nokia, said.
Nokia said this speed triples the bandwidth of the current network, and with the arrival of 5G, will offer customers the most efficiency and connectivity in support of the ever-increasing ultra-broadband traffic, as well as ensuring reliability and security.
The TIM backbone is a Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) network based on Nokia’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch. The network is automated and carries optical signals with a capacity of 100 Gb/s over distances of up to 1,800 kilometers, and 200 Gb/s up to 800 kilometers.
The TIM backbone, with a coverage of over 16,000 kilometers of fiber, and connecting to 65 national POPs (Point of Presence), has carried over 9,000 petabytes of data traffic in the last year, equivalent to the content of 2 billion DVDs.
“Today’s result, which triples transmission speed compared to the current one, confirms that TIM’s network is the most advanced infrastructure capable of offering new digital services and platforms, also with a view to developing 5G,” Elisabetta Romano, chief technology and innovation officer at TIM, said.
