Infinera And Seaborn Set Subsea Benchmark

Infinera and Seaborn Networks have successfully completed a 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 the Seabras-1 cable, owned and operated by Seaborn, with a distance of more than 10,500 km, enabling up to 50 percent more capacity than systems without advanced coherent technologies such as Nyquist sub-carriers and SD-FEC gainsharing.

Infinera and Seaborn validated the performance of the Infinera XTS-3300 meshponder featuring the Advanced Coherent Toolkit (ACT) on the Seabras-1 submarine cable, helping Seaborn to maximise the return on its cable assets. Seabras-1 is one of the world’s longest uncompensated subsea cables, directly connecting North and South America. Seaborn is the exclusive operator of a Seabras-1 route that has deployed XTS-3300.
The XTS-3300 is based on Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine 4 (ICE4) and is optimised for long-haul subsea applications. The ICE4 incorporates technologies to boost capacity-reach performance including digitally synthesieed Nyquist subcarriers, enhanced pre- and post-dispersion compensation, improved non-linear tolerance and SD-FEC gain sharing. These capabilities collectively support up to 18.2 terabits per second per fibre for distances over 10,000 km, powered by ICE4’s leadership in spectral efficiency.

“This is an impressive achievement that far surpasses what we expected. Infinera has distinguished itself as an industry leader in delivering outstanding subsea optical performance,” said Larry W. Schwartz, Chairman and CEO, Seaborn Networks. “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.”

“We are delighted with the performance of the XTS-3300 and the Infinite Capacity Engine 4 for subsea applications. The XTS-3300 delivers industry leading capacity-reach performance for our subsea customers where spectral efficiency is paramount and bandwidth demand is growing at more than 45 percent per year,” said Dave Welch, president and co-founder, Infinera. “Infinera delivers unparalleled optical performance, helping to enable the success of our customers as they transform their subsea networks to cloud scale.”