Mexican triple-play operator Megacable has announced the successful achievement of speeds of 1.1 Tbps in long-distance optic transmission tests conducted with network partner Network this week. The test validates Megacable's planned use of coherent optics to rapidly scale its network capacity. The technology partners described the implementation as a Latin American speed record in long-distance optical transmission, having reached 1.1 Tbps (Terabits per second) in single-carrier wavelength transmission over a long-distance fiber network.
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Trial Details and Success Factors
The trial was conducted over one of Megacable's existing long-distance routes with challenging fiber conditions and maintained all required network margins to replicate a real-world deployment scenario. The milestone was achieved over 390 km, with several intermediate ROADMs and no Raman amplifications.
A previous test, under similar conditions, demonstrated 900 Gbps in single-carrier transmission over 600 km, according to a joint statement. These tests are part of Megacable's plans to rapidly scale its network capacity, increasing long-distance data transmission speeds from 9.6 Tb to 28.8 Tb in the first phase and up to 38.4 Tb in a second test phase that will interconnect all its data centers nationwide.
For the trial, Finnish technology company Nokia deployed an optical transport solution based on its sixth-generation super-coherent PSE-6s technology over its existing 1830 PSS optical transport platform, running live traffic without impacting the network.
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Future Plans and Network Expansion
"We selected Nokia for this trial to prove our network evolution since our first deployment with Nokia was 9.6 Tbps of total capacity," said Megacable, commenting on the achievement.
"It will allow us to increase optical spectrum efficiency, enabling capacities up to 38.4 Tbps, as well as cost and power consumption efficiencies over our Optical Long Haul fiber network. These are the key aspects that we evaluate to cover the requirements of all markets to which Megacable provides connectivity, especially for Fiber High-speed connectivity, dedicated Enterprise links, and Carriers-to-Carrier services," Megacable added.
This optical network enables Megacable to provide ultra-broadband connectivity critical to business customers and necessary to support the accelerated growth of residential users. Additionally, Megacable will benefit from lower energy consumption in the network and a lower operating cost per bit, the official release said.
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Megacable
Megacable is one of the telecommunications operators in Mexico and Latin America, operating in all 32 states of the country and in more than 550 municipalities. As of March 31, 2024, Megacable had more than 5 million unique subscribers, including close to 4.9 million Internet subscribers, more than 3.9 million video subscribers, and close to 4.3 million fixed telephony service. Its services are offered through a network of more than 95.6 thousand kilometres, covering approximately 16 million homes.
