Windstream Wholesale completed a live network trial that transmitted a 1 Terabit wave over 541 km over its Intelligent Converged Optical Network (ICON) network between Dallas and Tulsa using digital coherent optics by Acacia, now part of Cisco.
The team also looped the circuit to establish an 800 Gbps link over a live network measuring 1,082 kilometers.
The trial employed Acacia’s Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8) module, which is powered by the Jannu DSP.
“With this trial, Windstream Wholesale and Acacia have broken through the Terabit limit, once again demonstrating the power and benefit of an open, disaggregated network,” said Art Nichols, chief technology officer for Windstream. “Our success here further validates Windstream Wholesale’s early adoption of the latest evolution advancements of coherent pluggables, and our strong partnership with Acacia enables us to understand and meet the rapidly evolving bandwidth needs of our customers.”
Acacia said its modules reduced power consumption by more than 65% while being more than 70% smaller than traditional network gear.
“As Windstream Wholesale is demonstrating, our CIM 8 module is breaking the Terabit threshold with deployable performance on a real network,” said Benny Mikkelsen, chief technology officer at Acacia. “By leveraging silicon photonics, we’ve been able to achieve the power consumption needed to bring the CIM 8 into a pluggable form factor and that is going to help Windstream cost-effectively meet their customers’ growing bandwidth demands.”
