Windstream Wholesale, Colt Technology Services and Nokia transatlantic 800GbE trial show viability in a live network setting

Windstream Wholesale, Colt Technology Services (Colt), and Nokia completed an 800 Gigabit Ethernet (800GbE) service trial connecting London with Chicago over an 8500km subsea and terrestrial route over the production network.

The advent of 800G technology marks a doubling of capacity to support advanced network applications like AI data center networking, content delivery networks, and financial data hub connections.

Following the successful trial completion, the three companies are exploring options to offer 800GbE connectivity services to global business customers.

Today, Windstream Wholesale is seeing the growing adoption of 400G and Nx400G. However, 800G is still in the early stages. 

Windstream Wholesale's SVP of strategy, John Nishimoto, said the 800G trial intends “to validate that 800G works and it’s stable.”

The trial showcased power-saving networking technologies from the three global tech businesses to test the boundaries of next-generation wavelength, capacity, speed, and latency between two of the world’s largest financial trading hubs.

Nishimoto said its work with Colt is part of its core identity, which centers around technology leadership, network expansion, and partnerships.

“We’ve done great technology partnerships with Colt, so this is just one string of several,” he said.

Like the previous generation of 400G, Windstream Wholesale's work on 800G reflects the provider’s vision to keep up with the next generation of network speeds.

“Several years ago, we tested 400G before it was market-ready,” Nishimoto said. “At that time, we tested 100G and NX100G when it was in its infancy, adding that while “the market wasn’t ready for 400G, we wanted to test it and validate its operations.”

Prasanna Sundaram, director of optical and fiber network engineering at Colt Technology Services, agreed that the company wants to be prepared to help its customers succeed in the AI era, achieve environmental sustainability, and strengthen its subsea network.

Like Windstream Wholesale, Colt offers 400G wavelength services on its IQ network. It can reach a large customer base due to the fact that it has fiber in over 29,000 buildings and over 900 data centres in Europe, Asia and America.

“Through this partnership with Windstream Wholesale and Nokia, we wanted to test the limits across land and sea and see what’s possible,” he said. “While it’s still early days, we want to be ready for our customers when they want 800G to support their AI ambitions.”

A collaborative effort

During the field trial, Colt connected one of its five Transatlantic subsea cables and part of its terrestrial fiber network with Windstream Wholesale’s domestic U.S. low latency optical fiber Intelligent Converged Optical Network (ICON) monitoring speed and performance.

Colt and Windstream Wholesale have partnered to demonstrate a transoceanic 800-gigabit ethernet (GbE) end-to-end service transport from router to router over 1 Tbps optical transport.

The trial ran over two carrier networks, so collaboration was key for Colt and Windstream Wholesale.

“What I appreciated with Nokia and Colt during calls and meetings is the collaboration and the pride of each engineering group,” Nishimoto said. “In any project, problems related to logistics and scheduling come up, but everyone pitched in, and it was great to see the collaboration of the three groups.”

Sundaram said working with Windstream Wholesale, and Nokia, which took place over five to six months, was centered around what each company could bring. “Each party supported each other to make this trial happen, and that’s the strength of collaboration, especially when we’re testing new hardware and software,” he said. “The willingness to take a risk on production and go beyond thousands of kilometers was compelling.”

Being a heterogeneous network, one of the key takeaways was that the Nokia equipment worked on top of different optical systems and line rates. “The interoperability and open architecture helped,” Nishimoto said.

The trial was delivered using Nokia’s sixth-generation Photonic Service Engine (PSE-6s) coherent optics and 7750 Service Router (SR) platforms. 

Nokia's PSE-6s can be used in a wide range of optical network applications, enabling upgrades to Nokia’s transponder, compact modular and packet-optical switching (P-OTN) platforms.

Nokia’s PSE-6s operate at 130 GBaud and higher speeds and are optimized for 150GHz WDM channel spacings. They support both shaped 16QAM and 64QAM modulation, continuously adjustable baud rate, and forward error correction (FEC) gain, which are jointly optimized with the probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) shaping gain.

James Watt, general manager for Nokia's optical networks division, said that what sets Windstream Wholesale and Colt’s efforts to demonstrate new technology like 800G is their ability to do so. What was different about this trial was that it was on a live existing network.

“It’s one thing to set this up in the lab or have a brand-new dedicated set of spans, but the challenge is to make the real-world network work,” he said. “Making 800G work in the real world across real spans, real endpoints, it takes a lot of teamwork with an operation team that has to ensure network uptime.”

He added that Nokia is focused on working with helping its customers test 800G and other technologies in live network scenarios.

In addition to its work with Windstream Wholesale and Colt, the vendor has announced 800G network trials with traditional providers like Zayo and research and education providers such as SURF, the collaborative organization for IT in Dutch education and research.   

“If you look at the pattern of announcements we have made, we spend a lot of time ensuring we get this out of the lab and get it into the field as early as we can and run in real-world scenarios,” Watt said. “We know that sometimes we’re the only vendor, but that’s not always the case.”