SaskTel, Canada's incumbent telco, completed a trial with Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) in which it delivered data at speeds of up to 400G on a fiber network which it said was originally built for 10G traffic.
During this trial, SaskTel transmitted 400G on a 250-kilometer live network link between Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan, and Saskatoon, leveraging Alcatel-Lucent's 1830 Photonic Service Switch. Alcatel-Lucent's 400G Photonic Service Engine (PSE) electro-optics chip enabled the telco to carry up to 400 Gbps of traffic.
One of the benefits of the solution is that it can be deployed simultaneously with existing 10G, 40G and 100G network links.
Similar to trials conducted by other service providers in North America and Europe, this will provide a test case for SaskTel as it considers an immediate upgrade to 100G and moving to 400G as network demands dictate.
The 100G and 400G testing comes at a time when SaskTel is aggressively expanding its infiNET Fiber to the Home (FTTH) service, which is part of its $800 million Next Generation Broadband Access Program, aimed to provide FTTH-based services to eight of its largest urban centers.
For more:
- see the release
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