Xtera Communications has launched its new flex-rate card, a next-generation coherent 100G/100G+ channel card to meet today’s and tomorrow’s ever-growing bandwidth demands.
The new card combines high transmission performance with multiple levels of flexibility in optical networking, including selectable wavelength to operate on either fixed or flexible optical grid and programmable signal protocols on the client side, and programmable modulation format (QPSK, 8QAM, or 16QAM), optical channel rate and spectral efficiency on the line side.
“Xtera’s new flex-rate card uses the latest coherent optical technology and delivers 100G, 200G, 300G or 400G channels in order to offer the level of capacity and reach performances required by network operators’ needs and applications, from regional terrestrial networks to long-haul repeatered submarine cable systems,” said Philippe Perrier, corporate VP, product line management of Xtera.
“The multi-fold flexibility adapts the characteristics of the optical channels and optimises the use of the physical resources available in the optical layer so that service providers can seamlessly face unplanned capacity demands with minimal time to market and without additional investment.”
Compared to previous-generations of 100G products, Xtera’s new channel card offers improved transmission performance due to enhanced SD-FEC and more powerful digital signal processing (DSP).
Using Xtera’s Nu-Wave Optima optical networking platform, the new 100G/100G+ card enables service providers to increase system capacity while lowering the total cost of ownership per transported bit (by achieving savings in equipment cost, power consumption and footprint requirements), and to optimise the sparing of the equipment throughout their network.
The new flex-rate card channel card is backward compatible with Xtera’s existing coherent deployments, including those that use the company’s Wise Raman amplification system. For terrestrial backbone networks applications, 240 x 100G (24Tbit/s) and 160 x 400G (64Tbit/s) line capacities can be transported on more than 4,500km and 1,500km, respectively, in existing networks.
In December 2013, Xtera introduced the XWDM solution that makes possible a capacity-reach metric which exceeds, by a factor of six, what is normally achievable by today’s erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA)-based 100G optical transport systems. For unrepeatered applications, a capacity of 15Tbit/s was recently transmitted over 410km, and 100G transmission was demonstrated on a 607km span.