CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is taking a look at what lies beyond 100G transmission by completing a 1 Terabit (Tbps) trial on a part of its fiber network in central Florida with vendor partner Ciena.
Leveraging Ciena's 6500 packet-optical platform equipped with its WaveLogic 3 16 QAM-based coherent optics, the service provider conducted the live field test earlier this month on its existing network.
Composed of 200 Gbps wavelengths packed closely together, the Terabit superchannel more than doubled the network's traffic carrying capacity during the trial.
CenturyLink and Ciena said that they were able to achieve spectral efficiency gains by using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 based 16QAM coherent modulation, WaveLogic 3 spectral shaping and Flexible Grid technologies.
James Feger, vice president, CenturyLink network strategy and development, said that exploring what new boundaries it can push its existing fiber network gives it a better understanding on how to scale its network to respond to emerging bandwidth demands from new consumer and business services like cloud and its Prism IPTV offering.
"Being able to quickly scale our network's capacity to keep up with increasing bandwidth demands means that customers will continue to have a positive experience using our cloud, hosted IT and high-speed broadband services, as well as video services like CenturyLink Prism TV," Feger said in a release.
While this was just a trial, CenturyLink has been hot on the trail of enhancing the speeds of metro, long-haul and core networks to 100G and future support for 400G. In October, the service provider completed the deployment of Alcatel-Lucent's (NYSE: ALU) 7950 XRS core router into its network, providing it with a common core network.
For more:
- see the release
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