SANTA CLARA, CA – Earlier this year, InterNexa S.A. joined the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, suppliers, integrators, and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach. Recently, InterNexa performed a successful field trial of TIP’s Voyager, an open optical transponder that successfully connected the cities of Bogota and Medellin reaching speeds of up to 200Gbps on a single optical port.
The TIP community’s collective aim is to collaborate on new technologies, examine new business approaches and spur new investments into the telecom space. The founding members – Facebook, Deutsche Telekom, Intel, Nokia and SK Telecom – have since been joined by over 500 operators, equipment vendors and systems integrators.
InterNexa is currently participating in TIP’s Open Optical Packet Transport Project Group, and is testing the innovative Voyager optical transponder in its optical transport networks in Colombia. InterNexa and ADVA Optical Networking’s engineering teams carried out this field trial that demonstrated the capabilities of Voyager, an open platform for packet transport over DWDM based on an open “white box” architecture that disaggregates the hardware and software. Voyager integrates in a single rack unit (1RU) chassis IP packet technologies, switching and DWDM transponders with 100G/200Gbps speeds over optical transmissions, making it ideal for metro and long-haul applications.
Voyager hardware and software components are integrated by the system supplier and fellow TIP member ADVA Optical Networking, which provided the Voyager optical transponders and engineering resources for this trial. Voyager was tested on InterNexa’s DWDM Ultra Long Haul optical networks to determine the optical performance of the line interfaces with different modulation formats. The goal was to verify its reach on a network topology with two paths betweenMedellin and Bogotá: one being a direct route of 370 km and the second an alternative route via Cali approximately 1,040 km long.
"We have found the Voyager Transponders very attractive for both their capacity on the DWDM line side for 100G/200Gbps speeds, and for the support of Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols and features,” said Gabriel J. Vivares Arias, Product Development Specialist at InterNexa’s Product Management. “So we worked with ADVA Optical Networking to design a trial in our network, over our DWDM system that interconnects the main cities of Colombia -- Bogotá, Medellin and Cali -- in order to run tests on an optical fiber network with a ring topology approximately 1,400 km long, based on a 50GHz ROADM architecture designed to support 40 x 100G channels, with optical links up to 130 km on the direct route Medellin - Bogotá (370 km in total) and at least 3 links with 180 km on average on the route through Cali, Medellin - Cali - Bogotá (1,040 km in total)."
The trial was carried out the week of October 23, 2017 with ADVA Optical Networking’s support, and the results exceeded the expectations of InterNexa with error-free passes of the 100G and 200Gbps Lambdas that connected the two main cities in Colombia. InterNexa is now looking forward to doing a second phase of the Voyager trial to accomplish interoperability tests in Layer 2 and Layer 3, including transmission tests in its Brazilian DWDM long haul network, leveraging the device’s converged packet/optical capabilities, which unlock new opportunities to make the network more flexible and cost-effective.