Pacific Crossing and Infinera Complete 100 Gb/s Subsea Trial on PC-1

Infinera  and Pacific Crossing, a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation​ and operator of the transpacific submarine cable system PC-1, announced the successful completion of a 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) subsea trial. The subsea trial spanned more than 9,500 kilometers on Pacific Crossing’s PC-1 fiber from California to Japan. This is the first and longest successful 100 Gb/s trial performed across the Pacific delivering digital coherent transmission.

This trial demonstrates the unique ability to deliver two industry firsts. The 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) demonstration was the first transmission of a 100 GbE client service carried across the Pacific using 40 Gb/s optical channels with Infinera’s FlexCoherent transmission. The success of this trial was based on Infinera’s commercially available 40 Gb/s optical line module and 100 GbE client interface on Infinera’s DTN platform. The second demonstration was the first realization of a 100 Gb/s optical channel using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) with soft decision forward error correction (SD FEC) that will be available in the future on Infinera’s DTN-X platform. Infinera’s FlexCoherent technology enables service providers to optimize transmission performance across a range of applications using multiple software-programmable modulation formats. Infinera recently announced the availability of new DTN capabilities and the new DTN-X platform featuring both photonic integrated circuit (PIC) based super-channels and FlexCoherent transmission.

The Asia Pacific region has been experiencing exponential growth in Internet bandwidth demand. According to Internet World Stats, the number of Internet users in Asia grew from 114 million to 922 million from 2000 to 2011. The growth is forecast to continue, thereby driving the need for subsea networking equipment that can deliver the required capacity.

“Customer demand for transpacific bandwidth continues to grow,” said Takahiro Sumimoto, Chief Executive Officer at Pacific Crossing. “We are delighted to work with Infinera to demonstrate 100 Gigabit transmission on our existing subsea fiber plant. We are also pleased that our leading transpacific network capabilities contributed to the successful demonstration of this new technology.”

“Infinera is pleased to partner with Pacific Crossing in conducting this trial as it marks a major milestone for the delivery of next-generation optical systems in the Asia Pacific region,” said Deryck Robinson, Vice President, Subsea Business Unit at Infinera. “We are committed to support the Asia Pacific region and believe this trial demonstrates the scale, simplicity and efficiency of Infinera’s solutions to provide a glimpse of what the network will be.”

Infinera has completed successful trials of 100 Gb/s and 500 Gb/s super-channels across the globe, recently with SEACOM in Africa and Interoute in Europe. To underscore its commitment to provide enhanced levels of service and support for customers in the Asia Pacific region, Infinera recently opened an office in Hong Kong with a customer demonstration center and a training center for its growing client base in the region.

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Source: Infinera , October 12 , 2011