A1, a member of Telekom Austria Group and Coriant Successfully Complete Industry’s First Field Trial Using Space Division Multiplexing and Showcase First 400G in Austria

Strategic technology collaboration between Coriant and A1, Austrian Subsidiary of Telekom Austria Group, highlights state-of-the-art technology and the first 400G field trial in Austria

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, September 23, 2013 – Coriant, a global supplier of future-proof optical transport solutions, and A1, the Austrian subsidiary of Telekom Austria Group, announced today the successful completion of the industry’s first demonstration of a fiber optic capacity upgrade in a live network environment using Space Division Multiplexing (SDM), a cutting-edge technology that promises record-breaking data transmission throughput. The successful field trial also included the first-ever demonstration of 400G transmission in Austria.

The 400G field trial ran over a 660km route between Salzburg and Vienna, and featured demonstration of 8-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (8-QAM) transmission format, which significantly increases transmission reach compared to alternative approaches. The successful trial in a production network environment included 400G transmission co-propagated with 40G and 100G on A1’s currently installed Coriant hiT 7300 optical transport systems. This achievement highlights Coriant’s ability to provide customers a future-proof solution based on a best-in-class transport system optimized for seamless scalability, automated network operations, and Software Defined Networking (SDN) intelligence.

“This recent field trial highlights the future-proof capability of our backbone network. A capacity of 400 Gbit/s means that some 5,000 users simultaneously watch HDTV or video streaming or use download from the internet via one single fiber.  This trial activity was an important step toward deepening our collaboration with Coriant and facilitating seamless deployment of next-generation technologies,” said Marcus Grausam, CTO of A1, the biggest operating company of the Telekom Austria Group.

100G coherent optical transmission will be at the core of long-haul networks for years to come, yet even these data rates will not be enough to cope with future demand as adoption of high-bandwidth applications by consumers and businesses increases over time. Coriant is delivering industry-leading optical transport solutions today with seamless scalability to 100G and beyond, while also working closely with customers to demonstrate the benefits of forward-looking technologies that hold significant promise for the future of optical networking. Space Division Multiplexing is one such technology.

The SDM field trial, conducted over A1’s 100G-equipped WDM backbone network based on Coriant hiT 7300 Intelligent Optical Transport systems, included field-deployed fibers with in-line multi-mode spans and multi-mode amplifiers. The multi-rate, multi-distance trial included a mix of 100G and 400G optical transmission links spanning distances as great as 1,245 kilometers between major network sites, including Vienna and Salzburg. The industry-first, field-based SDM upgrade scenario validates the ability of SDM to seamlessly interoperate with legacy networks in a multi-span and multi-rate transmission environment, holding further promise for ease of upgradeability within existing optical network architectures as capacity demands evolve.

“Testing 400G and SDM both reflect our ongoing commitment to meeting our customers’ evolving bandwidth hunger – today, and well into the future. We believe there will be a need for a new approach to maximizing capacity in the network beyond 2020, and we were very pleased at how straightforward Space Division Multiplexing technology worked in our laboratory test,” said Gunther Ottendorfer, Group CTO of the Telekom Austria Group.

Traditional Single Mode Fiber (SMF) transmission has been optimized over the last 10+ years with more and more parallel channels of higher and higher modulation speeds reaching 96 x 100G (9.6 terabits) capacity in current commercial systems. Further capacity increases in single mode systems is limited due to fundamental limits of information technology (e.g., Shannon’s law).  Space Division Multiplexing helps overcome these technical constraints and expands capacity by a factor of 10 or more. SDM utilizes multiple parallel WDM systems in a single fiber to increase the throughput by activating additional spatial modes, significantly increasing the bandwidth efficiency and transmission capacity. In the future, as traffic growth exhausts the available capacity of SMF, technologies such as SDM-over-multi-mode fibers offer a promising solution for high-capacity network scalability.

“While there are many challenges to overcome before advanced transmission technologies such as SDM make their way into commercials systems, this innovative field trial highlights our commitment to advancing the state of optical communications,” said Uwe Fischer, Chief Technology Officer, Coriant. “We are pleased to deepen our relationship with A1 and the Telekom Austria Group by demonstrating the future potential of high-capacity optical transmission, while at the same time validating the upgrade capability of their deployed transport systems from Coriant.”
 
Coriant conducted a part of this technology initiative in co-operation with ModeGap, a collaborative R&D project supported under the European Union to create the SDM technology.