Telstra Global, Infinera demo soft-decision FEC over Hawaii to California submarine link

Infinera Corp. (NASDAQ: INFN) says it has successfully demonstrated a 100-Gbps optical signal enhanced with soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) across 4,200 km of submarine fiber-optic cable connecting Hawaii to California. The link belongs to Telstra Global.

Infinera says the trial demonstrates the power of SD-FEC in concert with the company’s long-haul FlexCoherent superchannel technology, showing how it can optimize both reach and capacity on submarine cables worldwide. Infinera says its SD-FEC technology has the potential to double the transmission capacity of existing submarine fiber cables.

The subsea trial was performed over Telstra Global's dedicated fiber pair within Segment 5 of the AAG cable, connecting San Luis Obispo in Southern California to the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The trial was staged using Infinera's DTN-X platform and a prototype superchannel line card enabled with Infinera's third-generation FlexCoherent processor for real time SD-FEC processing combined with the industry's only 500-Gbps photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

Using the additional error recovery capability enabled by the SD-FEC, multiple Infinera FlexCoherent modulation formats were able to close this link with no bit errors detected. The SD-FEC enabled higher-order modulation formats to be used, which could allow Telstra to increase the available capacity on this link, thus increasing the commercial life of the cable in the face of aggressive increases in internet demand. A key characteristic of Infinera's FlexCoherent technology is that the line card can be configured for a specific modulation format via simple software controls, increasing flexibility and maximizing capacity and reach while lowering operational and inventory sparing costs.

Telstra Global is a part of Telstra Corporation Ltd., Australia's leading telecommunications and media services company. Telstra Global forecasts more than 60% annual growth in its trans-Pacific submarine cable traffic over the next three years.

Telstra Global managing director, Martijn Blanken said, "We are delighted by the results of this field trial, and this shows further increased capacity potential for Telstra Global's leading submarine cable plant."

Infinera co-founder and chief strategy officer, Dr. David Welch added, "We are pleased to see that our third-generation FlexCoherent Processor along with 500-Gbps PICs is performing exceptionally in real-world environments. Over the past few months we've shown that a PIC-based long-haul superchannel implementation can deal with record-breaking levels of PMD impairments in fiber; deliver a full 8 Tbps of capacity on dispersion-shifted fiber that service providers might have written off as useless; and now with Telstra's help we've shown that with the addition of SD-FEC, this technology is capable of being deployed on some of the longest and most challenging cable routes in the world."

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