A1 and Nokia deliver 800Gbps service 1276km across Europe on single wavelength...

25 Apr 2024

...and CERN's Large Hadron Collider communications upgraded to 800Gbps on existing fiber link.

Nokia and A1 Austria have successfully delivered an 800Gbps optical communications service on a single wavelength, covering a distance of 1276km in a live network from Frankfurt to Budapest. The field trial was completed using Nokia’s FP5 network processor, based on silicon, and its sixth-generation super-coherent Photonic Service Engine optics (“PSE-6s”).

A1 currently operates a Europe-wide IP and optical network based on Nokia’s service router portfolio, offering businesses and wholesale services to enterprises, web-scale players, and communication service providers’ end-users. A1 says that the combination of 800Gbps router interfaces and 800Gbps long-haul optical transport will allow it to efficiently scale its IP service and network capacity and provide wholesale service connectivity to customers.

Nokia’s PSE-6s optics were deployed in the shipping DMAT6 transponder with 2.4Tbps capacity, enabling transport of multiple 800GE services while reducing network power per bit. In addition, the FP5 network processor silicon will increase IP peering performance and scales to 800GE ports, reducing power per bit with more efficient IP connectivity and fewer network links. Nokia’s FP5 chipsets boost the networks to run up to 50 Tbps and significantly reduce A1’s operational and hardware costs.

Alexander Stock, CTO A1 Austria, commented, “We are committed to investing in our digital infrastructure and driving digitalization across Europe, and the success of this trial is a testament to the hard work delivered by our teams and by Nokia. It will not only allow us to lower costs per bit but will also provide the much-needed high-speed connectivity to our wholesale customers in 2024 and beyond.”

Matthieu Bourguignon, Senior Vice-President and head of Europe for Network Infrastructure business at Nokia, said, “Our IP and Optics solution enables wholesale services providers to support new 800Gbps services for end-users with the lowest network cost and power per bit, over any distance, including long-haul links.”

During the field trial, Nokia’s 7750 SR-1-46S router with FP5 supporting 800Gbps ports was connected to Nokia’s 1830 PSI-M with a PSE-6s line card operating at 800Gbps per wavelength over a 32-degree ROADM/WDM line system across 16 spans and 3 ROADM nodes.

800Gb/s transmission to prepare for upgrade of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

In a related development, Nokia and SURF, a collaborative organisation for IT in Dutch education and research, have achieved a single carrier 800Gb/s optical transmission over SURF’s existing cross border, multi-vendor research and education network infrastructure.

The transmission, based on Nokia’s photonic service engine technology, will help accelerate the massive data exchange between the CERN particle accelerator and the NL Tier-1 (NL T1) research IT facilities at SURF and Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics.

By reaching 800Gb/s per channel on older fiber varieties, Nokia and SURF say they have proved “that existing infrastructure still has tremendous potential, and that legacy optical fibers can be used to meet future capacity demands of the huge data streams generated by international scientific research instruments.”

The trial was conducted over a 1648 km point-to-point fiber link connecting Amsterdam and Geneva, crossing Belgium and France. The fiber link is part of the SURF-network, which connects national research and education institutes in the Netherlands, such as Nikhef.

SURF is preparing its network for CERN’s LHC upgrade to the HL-LHC that will become operational in 2029. The discovery of the Higgs boson by the LHC has already revolutionized the world’s understanding of the universe. Expectations are that the future HL-LHC will reveal even deeper insights into the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos.

The upgrade will not only provide more insightful research results and improve the potential for groundbreaking discoveries, but it will also produce enormous amounts of scientific data. The HL-LHC is expected to generate data at a rate of five times the speed of its predecessor. Therefore, it depends on advances in SURF’s high-performance network, as demonstrated in this trial, to enable fast and reliable data transfer to the NL T1 for further scientific exploration.