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Aloha PTC ‘19 – Acacia Prepares to Hang-10 at the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council event

By Lisa Crewe | Posted on January 21, 2019

PTC 2019

The Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) annual conference is the “Pacific Rim’s premier telecommunications event,” and Acacia will have a front row seat for it this year. PTC ‘19 kicks off Sunday, January 20 and runs through Wednesday, January 23, 2019, where subsea communications will be a hot topic, as organizations are faced with the challenge to enable increased utilization of deployed fiber for improved network capacity.

Given the fact subsea is of particular importance to Acacia and its customers, we’re excited it will be a big part of the “From Pipes to Platforms” theme at the conference – and that it comes on the heels of three subsea trials Acacia collaborated on and a blog article on the topic:

“Transmission of 400G over 6,600 km is a significant milestone and demonstrates what can be achieved with higher performance transmission optics combined with a well-designed line system. This field demonstration of an advanced solution that is just becoming commercially available highlights the value of Marea’s open architecture to evolve with the latest technology. By allowing early adoption of new technologies such as Acacia’s AC1200, we are able to increase the utilization of our deployed fiber, maximize our investment and improve network capacity.”

—Mark Filer, Principle Optical Engineer, Azure Networking, Microsoft Corp.

 

The 400G subsea field demonstration, conducted by Acacia in collaboration with Microsoft and Facebook, helped to demonstrate that improvements in capacity and spectral efficiency can enable increased utilization of deployed fiber and improved network capacity. Modulation formats greater than 4 bits/symbol were utilized to achieve a spectral efficiency of 6.41 b/s/Hz on the 6,600 km cable. This was achieved using Acacia’s suite of 3D Shaping features that enable fine-tune adjustment of the modulation characteristics to provide network operators with the flexibility to customize the transmission to their network requirements. This is especially important in a submarine network where multiple providers share the same fiber link, and are trying to optimize its capacity utilization of their assigned spectrum.

In his recent blog post on the growth of submarine cables and how the Cisco NCS 1004 fits, Cisco’s Product Manager Optical Systems & Optics Group, Sushin Suresan, talks about how spectral efficiency is the key metric to maximizing capacity on expensive submarine cable assets.

The Cisco NCS 1004 is the latest product in the DCI form-factor NCS 1000 series. It delivers multi-haul coherent DWDM transponders that provide state of the art performance for sub-sea applications using granular baud-rate + bits per symbol tuning, time-hybrid modulation, transmit signal shaping and non-linear equalization. Each 2RU form-factor NCS 1004, powered by Acacia’s Pico Digital Signal Processor chip, provides 8 coherent DWDM ports that operate from 100G to 600G.

ADVA announced that its FSP 3000 CloudConnect™ TeraFlex™ succeeded in transporting 300Gbit/s of data per wavelength over a 6,800km fiber link. ADVA and Acacia conducted the trial, which was the first in the industry to cover the trans-Atlantic distance with a fiber link typical of a cost-optimized submarine cable using 300Gbit/s channels and a commercially available transponder with real-time digital signal processing (DSP). The demo, which also achieved the highest spectral efficiency for such a link carrying 300Gbit/s per wavelength with 70GHz channel spacing, highlights the capabilities of the ADVA FSP 3000 TeraFlex solution, which incorporates the suite of advanced performance features in Acacia’s Pico coherent DSP, to support flexible, ultra-high-capacity, long-haul and subsea data transport.

Triggered by the increasing demand for data driven by cloud-based services, we’re seeing a significant expansion in long-haul and subsea cable networks. We believe these trials give a major boost not only to long-haul and submarine network operators but also to cloud-content and digital media providers looking for ways to cost-efficiently deliver more to their customers around the globe.

Attending PTC? Alan Gibbemeyer, senior director of global business development at Acacia, will be on hand at the conference along with other members of the team to discuss these developments. To schedule a meeting at PTC ’19 contact us.