By Catherine Sbeglia Nin
Nokia and Rakuten Mobile announced the results of a January demonstration in which the pair successfully trialed a live 1 Terabit per channel (1 Tb/s) transmission over the carrier’s commercial Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexer (DWDM) network, claiming an industry first.
The trial, which connected data centers located 135 km apart in the Kanto region in Japan, achieved a speed increase of 500 per cent on Rakuten Mobile’s existing network running at 200 Gb/s.
“We are delighted with the performance of 1 Tb/s per channel on our optical network in collaboration with Nokia,” commented Tareq Amin, representative director and CEO of Rakuten Mobile, Inc. “This technical milestone will allow us to maximize bits per fiber and achieve improved power efficiency. The enhanced capacity will also support our traffic growth, deliver higher bandwidth and enable Rakuten Mobile to provide new service offerings.”
Using Nokia’s Photonic Service Engine (PSE) supporting 1 Tb/s capacity over a 150 GHz optical spectrum, the pair established the feasibility of delivering 32 Tb/s per fiber in C-band, which can be expanded to 64 Tbps by adding L-band over a Nokia DWDM line system used in Rakuten Mobile’s optical network.
“The 1 Terabit per channel trial demonstrated the capability to dramatically increase fiber capacity and future-proof the Rakuten Mobile network infrastructure to support new high speed data center interconnection,” said head of Market Unit Japan, Nokia, John Lancaster-Lennox.
As Rakuten Mobile continues to scale up its network capacity to enable 5G connectivity, video and new applications, the 1 Tb/s solution from Nokia will help the carrier reduce its footprint, and in doing so, improve operational expenditure and flexibility to rollout in data centers.
