Africa telecom operator MTN has conducted live trial of a Transport Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and 2.4Tbit/s wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system – in association with Huawei – on MTN’s fiber backbone network in South Africa.

This SDN trial is currently the fastest and most intelligent optical network to date in the industry, said Huawei in a statement.

In the first scenario, the single-channel 2.4 Tbit/s field trial achieved 2.4 Tbit/s with 16QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) over a transmission distance exceeding 300 km. In the second scenario, 2 Tbit/s with QPSK was achieved over a transmission distance of 1031 km, said Huawei.

Huawei Transport SDN solutions, using physical network modeling and resource abstraction, have realized transmission pipe virtualization. This trial demonstrated SDN features such as Bandwidth on Demand (BoD), Virtual Transport Service (VTS) and Automatic O&M functions.

Navi Naidoo, group technology officer, MTN, said: “MTN continues to invest in transport networks to realize world class technologies. We believe that networks such as cloud computing, streaming media and mobile broadband must be scalable, intelligent and flexible.

Baburajan K
[email protected]