CenturyLink, the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S., has successfully tested superchannel transmission speeds of one terabit per second (1 Tbps) on a portion of its fiber network in central Florida. The test used Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platform equipped with WaveLogic 3 16QAM-based coherent optics and Flexible Grid photonic layer. The terabit superchannel, composed of five 200 Gbps wavelengths closely packed together, more than doubled the network’s traffic carrying capacity during the trial, demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of CenturyLink’s network.
“This 1 terabit per second trial complements the work we are doing to transform our network and prepares us to meet our customers’ growing bandwidth needs now and into the future,” said James Feger, vice president, CenturyLink network strategy and development. “Being able to quickly scale our network’s capacity to keep up with increasing bandwidth demands means that customers will continue to have a positive experience using our cloud, hosted IT and high-speed broadband services, as well as video services like CenturyLink Prism TV.”
Spectral efficiency gains in the trial were achieved by using Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 based 16QAM coherent modulation, WaveLogic 3 spectral shaping, and Flexible Grid technologies.
