Windstream and optical networking company Infinera said that they successfully achieved 800 Gbps single-wavelength transmission over 730 kilometers on Windstream’s long-haul network between San Diego, California and Phoenix, Arizona.
The two companies also claimed another industry record by looping the signal back and achieving 700G transmission over 1,460 km, according to Infinera, whose Infinite Capacity Engine coherent optical tech was used in the testing.
Ciena, which has also been focused on bringing to market 800G capabilities, described the implications of 800G this way: “Along with single-carrier 800Gb/s throughput for short reach distances, users can scale their entire optical infrastructure, achieving record-breaking capacity per wavelength for all network paths: 600Gb/s across 1,000km links, 400Gb/s across ultra-long-haul routes, and 200Gb/s across Trans-Pacific compensated cables,” the company said in a blog post. “At the end of the day, what does this step-level improvement in performance mean for our customers? Less hardware to deploy and manage, less energy consumption, and reduced cost per bit.”
However, Nokia took to its own blog recently to dispute the level of real benefit of 800G wavelengths, arguing that they are still inherently limited by modulation and that “optical fiber type, fiber attenuation, and span distances (losses) also play primary roles in defining optical reach.”
“The real benefit may be less about headline grabbing 800G wavelengths, and more about enabling 400-600G wavelengths over regional to subsea distances,” wrote Randy Eisenach, who is part of the WDM and High Speed Optics Product Management team at Nokia.
In other test news:
–National Instruments is rebranding and taking on its long-time nickname of NI as the company’s official name. “We’re shortening our name to NI to acknowledge the global markets we serve and because we do so much more than create ‘instruments,'” wrote President and CEO Eric Starkloff in a message to customers on the company’s revamped website.
“The events of the last several months have … changed our lives,” he wrote. “The gravity of those events made us stop and reflect if now was the right time to introduce these changes to you. But to us, the answer was clear: our world needs engineers now more than ever. … We live in a world built and defined by engineers and technology. And it’s their passion and innovation that will ensure we come out of this challenging time stronger.”
-The 5G testing equipment market is forecasted to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 8.8% from 2020 through 2027 and reach $3.23 billion by 2027, according to new analysis from Grand View Research. “Rapidly escalating demand for smartphones, along with higher internet speeds, has resulted in vigorous manufacturing of 5G-enabled smartphones across the globe, which is propelling the market growth,” the analyst firm said. In terms of specific 5G testing equipment, Grand View said that signal and spectrum analyzers dominated the market in 2019, with a share of 24.8% of the overall testing equipment market. In terms of regions, Grand View said that the United States dominated the testing equipment market with a share of 41.9% in 2019, because of early 5G technology adoption and the beginning of network deployments. However, the company added, Europe is also expected to see high demand for 5G services — and therefore, for 5G test equipment — and the Asia Pacific region is “expected to witness significant growth” over the coming years, driven by major deployments of 5G in China, Japan and South Korea with a focus on media, entertainment, transportation and logistics, manufacturing and other industry verticals.
–Keysight Technologies has a series of virtual test courses and demonstrations coming up next week that focus on millimeter wave. The three days of sessions run from June 23-25.
–RootMetrics has been sending out its network testers again, after pausing its cyclical testing due to stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions. So those folks in the field had a front-row seat to the major T-Mobile US outage on Monday. Read the full story here.
