Infinera, a supplier of networking solutions, and American Tower, a leading independent owner, operator and developer of multi-tenant communications real estate, have announced the successful completion of the first point-to-multipoint coherent optical transmission in a carrier network environment in Latin America.
This field trial was conducted with Infinera’s XR optics technology over American Tower’s passive optical network (PON) in Colombia. The trial demonstrated XR optics’ compatibility with existing Gigabit PON (GPON) traffic over a single-fibre PON deployment in a metro regional area.
The partners say that the proof of concept shows American Tower’s ability to take advantage of the transformative value that XR optics can provide in the company’s existing network infrastructure.
With over 400Gb of available capacity per leaf, Infinera says XR optics is designed to enable network operators like American Tower to dramatically simplify their network architectures and significantly reduce capex and opex costs while enhancing network scalability.
The partners say that this demonstration paves the way for American Tower to leverage XR optics to cost-effectively launch new revenue-generating services and 5G.
Indeed, Paul Choiseul, Fibre CTO EMEA & Latin America at American Tower, was quoted as saying that American Tower is evolving its network in preparation for new edge data centre and 5G applications, and thus “we are always looking for innovative technologies to help us achieve greater value on our existing infrastructure".
He added: "This technology will allow us to provide high-capacity, ultra-low-latency solutions over our existing PON networks that will satisfy edge data centre and 5G requirements.”