Companies Set Subsea Industry Benchmark for Fiber Optic Cable Capacity Reach
Infinera and Seaborn Networks have completed a successful subsea field trial demonstrating the industry’s highest spectral efficiency on an ultra-long-haul subsea cable. The 8QAM trial demonstrated 4.5 bits per second per hertz on Seaborn’s Seabras-1 cable, with a distance of more than 10,500 kilometers, enabling up to 50 percent more capacity than systems without advanced coherent technologies, such as Nyquist sub-carriers and SD-FEC gainsharing. The trial also validated the performance of the Infinera XTS-3300 meshponder, featuring the Advanced Coherent Toolkit, on the Seabras-1 submarine cable.
The XTS-3300 is based on Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine 4 and is optimized for long-haul subsea applications. The technology incorporates unique technologies to boost capacity-reach performance, including digitally synthesized Nyquist subcarriers, enhanced pre- and post-dispersion compensation, improved non-linear tolerance and SD-FEC gain sharing. Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine 4 also supports up to 18.2 terabits per second per fiber for distances over 10,000 km.
“This is an impressive achievement that far surpasses what we expected,” said Larry W. Schwartz, Chairman and CEO, Seaborn Networks. “Infinera has distinguished itself as an industry leader in delivering outstanding subsea optical performance,” “The Infinera XTS-3300 meshponders deliver industry-leading performance over Seabras-1 and validate Infinera’s technology leadership in subsea transmission. The capacity upgrade maximizes our return on investment and further underscores the uniqueness of Seaborn’s capacity on Seabras-1.”
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