Technology

Infinera has carried out a successful submarine network field test of its Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE) with Canalink, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ITER group. Canalink owns a system of undersea fibre-optic cables linking the Canary Islands with the Iberian Peninsula and the western coast of Africa.

The test, which was conducted on Canalink’s 1,393km cable linking the Conil landing point on the Spanish mainland with Tenerife in the Canary Islands, showed that it would be possible to upgrade the subsea cable well beyond its original design capacity.

The design of the optical connector hasn’t changed in more than 30 years, but now a company with expertise in precision metal stamping hopes to change that.

California-based nanoPrecision Products has redesigned the optical ferrule, the part that keeps the fibre in position inside an optical connector. Currently made from two ceramic pieces glued together with epoxy, the new design uses metal instead and is much easier to manufacture.

The European Union is investing €15.5 million into PIXAPP, a consortium that will establish what is thought to be world’s first open access photonic integrated circuit (PIC) assembly and packaging pilot line. The announcement was made to coincide with the Photonics21 annual general meeting, currently underway in Brussels.

The investment is designed to provide Europe with a state-of-the-art infrastructure that will support the industrial development and manufacture of PICs.

Finding ingenious, software-driven methods to improve the performance of optical hardware is one of the hot topics at OFC 2017, and every vendor has a unique interpretation.

Optical systems vendor Coriant used the show to unveil a real-time performance and analysis software toolkit that it calls “Coriant Aware Technology”. The new capabilities will increase transmission reach and capacity, enable faster and simpler wavelength planning and provisioning, and improve service availability, the company says.

OFC 2017, LOS ANGELES – Nokia and Facebook have shown that it should be possible to cram 32Tb/s over a 5,500km submarine cable between New York and Ireland, an increase of two and a half times the cable’s stated operational capacity.

The field trial, which used a Bell Labs invention called “probabilistic constellation shaping” (PCS), also achieved a record spectral efficiency for a submarine cable of 7.46 b/s/Hz.

OFC 2017, LOS ANGELES – Ciena is introducing new capabilities that “empower network operators to tune, control and dynamically adjust optical capacity in an on-demand world”, which go under the umbrella of “Liquid Spectrum”.

At first glance it sounds like just another software-defined networking (SDN) story, when in fact there’s some very cool technology buried in Ciena’s announcement.

Moving optical capacity from one place to another in a DWDM network can be difficult, but Infinera claims to have solved this challenge by making its bandwidth licence process more responsive to customer needs.

The result – which the company calls ‘Instant Network’ – allows customers to turn up capacity in just a few minutes rather than the hours it would have taken using its Instant Bandwidth licenses, or the months that it can take using a traditional capacity planning process.

Prysmian Group, the energy and telecom cable specialist, has delivered what it claims is the densest and highest fibre count underwater optical cable ever made.

An underwater FlexTube cable containing 1,728 optical fibres has now been successfully deployed by the Australian telecom provider Superloop for its TKO Express project, to provide internet connectivity between the areas of Siu Sai Wan on Hong Kong Island and the data centre hub of Tseung Kwan O (TKO) Industrial Estate on the mainland.

Last year when Microsoft said it was shunning purpose-built data centre interconnect (DCI) boxes in favour of 100G modules that could be plugged directly into data centre switches, there was concern that optical vendors could miss out on this market (see Microsoft shakes up the data centre interconnect market).

But ADVA Optical Networking seemed quietly confident that wouldn’t happen.

Silicon photonics is ready to make its mark in metro and short-reach data centre interconnect (DCI) networks, judging from an announcement by optical systems vendor Coriant.

The vendor is introducing a short-reach CFP2-ACO pluggable module, optimised to provide cost-effective 200G connectivity over single-span distances up to 80km on its Groove G30 platform.