BT and Huawei have completed a 400Gb/s trial over the optical fibres that form BT Ireland’s live network between Dublin and Belfast, the first trial of its kind in either the UK or Ireland.
The trial was conducted by running 400Gb/s transmission through existing live 10Gb/s, 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s wavelengths. The trial also revealed how BT’s core fibre optic infrastructure could work even more efficiently in the future, reducing the need to invest in more infrastructure as customers’ bandwidth demands grow.
The trial has now paved the way for full commercial deployment of 200Gb/s and 400Gb/s speeds on the BT Ireland core transmission network by March 2015 from both Dublin and Belfast.
Alex Crossan, managing director, commercial networks, at BT Ireland, said: “The combination of BT Ireland’s leading-edge network, the expertise of our local team and the optimum geographical distance between Dublin and Belfast, made Ireland the perfect location for our innovative 400Gb/s trial. The results essentially demonstrate how we will now be able to maximise the efficiency of our network investment, building on our core network infrastructure whilst continuing to meet the ever increasing needs of our customers in a fast evolving digital world. These in-life trials have also been crucial in understanding the capabilities of these new technologies, and have allowed us to accelerate our plans to deploy with confidence in the very near future.”
Ryan Ding, president of products & solutions at Huawei, added: “With the rapid growth of mobile broadband and video services generating tremendous volumes of traffic for backbone networks, the time is now for 400Gb/s.”
The link between Dublin and Belfast is approximately 200km long, and shares wavelengths with an existing live commercial BT Ireland DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) network between Dublin and Dundalk carrying existing 10Gb/s, 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s customer wavelengths. The 400Gb/s signal comprises 2x200G in adjacent 50GHz wavelength slots and can be selectively configured to any wavelength slots available on the live network.
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