Windstream Wholesale, Cisco Take 1Tbps to 1,100km

The age of the terabit draws ever closer. Today Windstream Wholesale and Cisco revealed another successful demonstration at the leading edge of transmission speeds. Top billing went to an industry first of a 1Tbps wavelength over a 1,100km link on fiber between Miami and Jacksonville.

But they also managed 800G over a set of mixed fiber stretching 1,387 on a route between Miami and Atlanta passing through Tallahassee, and an impressive 600G over 2,774km on fiber between Miami and Atlanta. Clearly they’ve been busy down in the southeastern part of the country of late.

The gear behind the tests was Cisco’s NCS 1014 C0-Band 2.4T WDM and the Acacia CIM 8. According to Cisco, the CIM 8 was designed to deliver up to 1.2Tbps and is powered by their 8th generation Jannu DSP ASIC. Beyond the speed upgrade, the gear also custs power consumption significantly as compared to the current generation.

Windstream Wholesale has put a lot of work into its multi-vendor ICON network infrastructure. This particular set of demonstrations is part of a long term collaboration with Cisco, the past fruits of which have since been directly incorporated into their operations today. In fact, 10 months ago they demonstrated 1Tbps over 541km via the same vendor gear between Dallas and Tulsa, a feat they have obviously now doubled.

In other words, it’s pretty likely Windstream will roll a 1Tbps wavelength into its operations not so far in the future. Network traffic growth is a never ending story of course, and with AI helping drive the next wave of infrastructure development we’re definitely going to be needing bigger pipes sooner rather than later.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Telecom Equipment