Applications

A group of researchers from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, alongside Huawei, have re-tooled an artificial intelligence technique to improve efficiency in optical transport networks (OTNs).

Rural broadband provider Gigaclear Networks is beefing up its backhaul network by deploying a 100G transport system powered by optical hardware and intelligent software from US vendor Ciena.

The 100G network will connect multiple countryside locations in the UK to enable Gigaclear’s internet service provider customers to offer advanced services, such as HD video streaming to business and residential end users.

Scottish secondary school pupils at Kyle Academy secondary school in Ayr, Scotland, have benefited from next-generation high-speed wireless internet connectivity following the deployment by pureLiFi of its LiFi solutions, using light to establish wireless internet connections.

Australia’s broadband network operator NBN Co has started enabling DOCSIS 3.1 cable technology on its Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) network in a move to increase activations. The incumbent intends to focus on doubling the downstream capacity on the network, which is due for completion in 2020.

Brazilian regional service provider, Copel Telecom has deployed 200G optical transmission technology from Coriant to scale its fibre optic backbone network in the State of Paraná.

Google is building a new submarine cable system to connect the East coast of the United States with Europe. TE SubCom has been selected to build the Dunant four-fibre pair cable system, which will span more than 6,400km.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, have demonstrated a 4,000km fibre-optical transmission link using ultra low-noise, phase-sensitive optical amplifiers. The reach improvement shown is 5.6 times that which is possible when using conventional erbium-doped fibre amplifiers. ​

Vodafone has successfully completed a live network trial in Spain as part of its work with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), using the Voyager optical ‘white box.’

The goal of the live trial was to showcase the future of applying a disaggregated model to optical networks and to provide more flexibility to handle the real time dynamics using Voyager, combined with a software-defined network (SDN) controller.

CableLabs has published two new specifications to ‘dramatically increase’ capacity of the fibre access network with point-to-point coherent optics technology, allowing for 100Gb/s per wavelength.

Using amplitude, phase, and polarisation to enable much higher fibre capacities, coherent optics can help to improve streaming, video conferencing, file uploads and downloads and future usage needs for technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, and by gaining more capacity from existing fibres, the need to lay more can be eliminated.