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Nokia and SURF conducted an 800G optical transmission trial over SURF’s Amsterdam-Geneva fiber link
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Nokia exec Dave Nowoswiat said the trial showed how Nokia can use existing fiber infrastructure to transmit the data scientific research centers need
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The vendor has deployed optical technology for other research and education networks across Europe, as well as for the Department of Energy in the U.S.
Of all the use cases we hear about for coherent optics, scientific research is probably one of the coolest.
Nokia and SURF, an organization of Dutch educational and research institutions, conducted an 800G optical transmission trial over SURF’s 1,648-kilometer point-to-point fiber link, which connects Amsterdam and Geneva and crosses Belgium and France.
The fiber link connects national research and education institutes in the Netherlands. SURF’s network is also connected to the LHC Optical Private Network, which provides access to data at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest particle accelerator.
Dave Nowoswiat, Nokia’s research and education network and enterprise strategist, told Fierce Network the trial showed how Nokia can use existing infrastructure to support the capacity these scientific research centers are looking for.
Essentially, they needed a way to “transmit all these huge amounts of petabytes of data that would be going out to all the research universities throughout the world studying subatomic particles and things like that,” he said.
What Nokia did was deploy its Photonic Service Engine (PSE-6s) optical chipsets on SURF’s Amsterdam-Geneva link, increasing transmission capacity from 400 Gbps to 800G.
SURF is prepping its network for CERN’s particle accelerator upgrade, which is expected to become operational in 2029. Once that happens, “they’ll be able to transmit all this data across this link.”
This high data capacity is useful for national research and education networks (RENs) – specialized ISPs that support research and education communities within a country.
So, they need to share scientific data with one another in a reliable way.
Using old fiber for new scientific developments
“You can’t afford to have retransmissions of lots and lots of data. It’s just too costly for the RENs to be able to transmit that data, and if they get an error that means they have to retransmit again. That’s just not realistic,” Nowoswiat said. “Especially when they’re using supercomputers to do some of these calculations.”
Furthermore, these research institutions are predominantly funded by the governments in their country. The government may not necessarily have the budget to upgrade the RENS every year.
“What we’re allowing them to do is utilize the existing equipment and the existing fiber plant that’s already been deployed, so they don’t have to upgrade everything,” said Nowoswiat. “We’re just adding additional capacity to it.”
The Amsterdam-Geneva link is just one part of SURF’s network, which spans around 13,000 kilometers of dark fiber, according to Migiel de Vos, team lead network development at SURF.
He said SURF came in touch with Nokia a couple of years ago about upgrading its network to be 800G capable. At the time, SURF’s optical engineering team didn’t think it was possible, partly because SURF’s fiber is around 15 years old.
As for why Nokia was chosen to carry out the upgrade, de Vos noted from an R&D perspective, the vendor was “quite far ahead.” The trial itself lasted roughly three weeks. During that time, SURF asked the ATLAS Experiment (ATLAS is one of CERN’s two general-purpose particle detectors) if they could share real data on the SURF network.
“They did actually send live data from Geneva to Amsterdam,” he said, which came to around 660 Gbps, going under SURF’s 800 Gbps capacity. The ATLAS Experiment’s data was then “directly sent to storage, which is really impressive.”
Nokia’s no stranger to the scientific research space. It’s deployed optical technology to RENs in Norway and Portugal, for example. Nokia Bell Labs also recently partnered with a team of U.K. scientists to hit a new fiber speed record using E- and S-band spectrum.
In the case of Norway, Nowoswiat noted the REN there is using Nokia gear for undersea cable distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Basically, DAS is a technology that enables continuous, real-time measurements along the length of a fiber cable, so you can figure out “how the environment is interfacing to the cable itself.”
And in the U.S., Nokia’s also working with ESnet, the Department of Energy’s network that connects government laboratories with scientists around the world.
Why does this matter?
Dell’Oro analyst Jimmy Yu noted scientific research (along with cloud hyperscale) are the “two industries that come to mind” when someone mentions high performance computing.
“High optical transmission speed is important to scientific research institutions because they gather, compute and store extremely large amounts of data in pursuit of their research,” Yu said.
Not only does the trial show Nokia’s PSE-6 coherent technology can extend “the reach of a single 800 Gbps carrier into long haul applications” over 1,500 kilometers, but also “higher wavelength speeds with longer spans before a signal regeneration is needed.”
Yu added higher wavelength speeds usually translate to better economics (i.e., lower cost-per-bit of transport), better network performance as well as network efficiency gains.