Infinera and DANTE set Guinness World Record on GÉANT network

Infinera and DANTE have achieved a Guinness World Record for the fastest rate of provisioning multi-Terabit optical capacity across the GÉANT Network. The record underscores how an Intelligent Transport Network enables service providers to use the rapid provisioning time to increase revenues with reliable, differentiated services while reducing operating costs through scale, multi-layer convergence and automation.

Infinera and DANTE were able to install and activate eight Terabits per second (Tb/s) of long haul super-channel optical capacity, enough capacity to simultaneously stream 1.6 million high-definition movies in each direction. This capacity was activated across the GÉANT production network in 19 minutes and 1 second after plugging in the first line card.

The record was set using an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network, featuring the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform, deployed on the GÉANT backbone across a long distance link from Vancis Amsterdam, The Netherlands to GlobalConnect Hamburg, Germany.

“Working with Infinera to achieve the Guinness World Record for fastest provisioning of long-haul transmission capacity on a live network is consistent with our day-to-day experience operating an Intelligent Transport Network,” said Michael Enrico, CTO of DANTE. “Infinera provides the easy-to-deploy multi-Terabit capacity we need to rapidly scale GÉANT, Europe’s largest research and education network.”

The DTN-X platform provides transmission capacity using 500 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) super-channel line cards which require only two fiber connectors each. Sixteen such cards and 32 fiber connections were deployed at each end of the link, and once the super-channels were in operation a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) service was provisioned over the link. The total time from the insertion of the first super-channel line card to the activation of the 100 GbE service was 19 minutes and 1 second resulting in a provisioning rate of 26.02Tb/s per hour. Competitive alternatives in the marketplace today only offer 100 Gb/s line cards and to achieve the same level of capacity would require the installation of 160 line cards and 320 fiber connections.

“We know that service providers are facing increasing capacity demands at a multi-Terabit scale," said Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions and Technology at Infinera, and leader of the record-breaking team. "Our ability to turn up a full eight Tb/s of capacity in less than 20 minutes clearly demonstrates the superiority of the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network in meeting those challenges, allowing service providers to use time as a weapon to increase revenue.”

One of the independent observers for the test was Wolf Pueschner, previously the senior vice president for Deutsche Telecom’s Global Network Factory, and now an independent telecommunications consultant in Germany.

“Many companies still make the mistake of underestimating the value of a network's ease of operation when selecting a vendor," said Pueschner. "Operators that are best prepared in a highly competitive environment differentiate with solutions that are easy to operate and can quickly turn up services. Transport solutions like Infinera Intelligent Transport Network is a way to win business. This was an unprecedented demonstration, and extremely impressive.”

The test was completed using the Infinera DTN-X platform which delivers the industry’s only production ready long haul 500Gb/s FlexCoherent super-channels based on 500 Gb/s Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), engineered to be upgradeable to one Terabit super-channels in the future. The DTN-X converges five Terabits of non-blocking OTN switching into the same platform, resulting in much more efficient network utilization when compared to conventional WDM architectures. Intelligent software combined with this converged platform automates manual operations to lower operational costs and enable faster service delivery.