Earlier this month, Infinera and DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) set a record for fastest provisioning of long haul optical transmission capacity. In less than 20 minutes, the network specialists enabled enough capacity to support the simultaneous streaming of 1.6 million HD films in both directions.
Under the watchful eye of Guiness World Record officials, the two companies installed and activated 8 Terabits per second (Tbps) of long-haul, super channel optical capacity across the GÉANT network. The entire setup took just 19 minutes and 1 second from start to finish, resulting in a provisioning rate of 26.02 Tbps per hour.
The team deployed Infinera’s Intelligent Transport Network with its DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform on the GÉANT backbone across a long distance link from Vancis Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to GlobalConnect Hamburg, Germany. The DTN-X platform employs 500 Gigabit per second (Gbps) super-channel line cards which require only two fiber connectors each. There were sixteen such cards and 32 fiber connections in place at each endpoint. Once the super-channels were ready, the technicians provisioned a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) service over the link.
According to the official announcement, “the DTN-X converges five Terabits of non-blocking OTN switching into the same platform, resulting in much more efficient network utilization when compared to conventional WDM architectures. Intelligent software combined with this converged platform automates manual operations to lower operational costs and enable faster service delivery.”
“Working with Infinera to achieve the Guinness World Record for fastest provisioning of long-haul transmission capacity on a live network is consistent with our day-to-day experience operating an Intelligent Transport Network,” said Michael Enrico, CTO of DANTE. “Infinera provides the easy-to-deploy multi-Terabit capacity we need to rapidly scale GÉANT, Europe’s largest research and education network.”
GÉANT is the largest research and education network in Europe with 50 million users located at 10,000 different academic and government research organizations across Europe.