Fibre Optic
© Ivan Soares Ferrer

Infinera and DANTE Set Guinness World Record on GÉANT Network

A new Guinness World Record has been set on Europe’s GÉANT Network, an e-infrastructure helping to achieve the European Research Area.

The world record was set for the fastest rate of provisioning multi-Terabit optical capacity across the GÉANT Network. Infinera, a leading provider of Intelligent Transport Networks, and DANTE, an operator of advanced networks for research and education, installed eight Terabits per second (Tb/s) of long haul super-channel optical capacity, enough capacity to simultaneously stream 1.6 million high definition films in each direction. This capacity was activated across the GÉANT production network in 19 minutes and 1 second; this gave a provisioning rate of 26.02 Tb/s per hour.

The record was set using an Intelligent Transport Network, featuring the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform deployed on the GÉANT backbone across a long distance link from Vancis Amsterdam in the Netherlands to GlobalConnect in Hamburg, Germany.

Commenting in the record, Michael Enrico, chief technology officer of DANTE said: “Infinera provides the easy-to-deploy multi-Terabit capacity we need to rapidly scale GÉANT, Europe’s largest research and education network.”

The DTN-X platform provides transmission capacity using 500 Gigabit per second super-channel line cards which require only two fibre connectors each. Sixteen such cards and 32 fibre connections were deployed at each end of the link, and once the super-channels were in operation, a 100 Gigabit Ethernet service was provisioned over the link.

Infinera help carriers exploit the increasing demand for cloud-based services and data centre connectivity as advances are made into the Terabit Era. GÉANT is the pan-European research and education network that interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks and connects over 50 million users at 10,000 institutions across Europe, supporting research in areas such as energy, the environment, space and medicine.