Facebook has deployed the world’s longest terrestrial multi terabit route to accelerate data transmission.
For that, it has deployed an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network to light the world’s longest terrestrial optical network route capable of transmitting up to eight terabits per second (8Tb/s) of data. The new route spans 3,998 kilometers.
Facebook’s European terrestrial network stretches from its Lulea, Sweden, data center across major hubs throughout Europe. The social media major deployed the DTN-X platform that also features SDN-ready application programming interfaces, to connect these hubs, harnessing Infinera’s FlexCoherent solution to deliver terabits of capacity on a single fiber across the continent.
Today, Facebook delivers to its European network 100 gigabit per second (Gb/s) coherent transmission via 500 Gb/s super-channels, featuring a forward-scale design to support 1.2 Tb/s super-channels in the future.
The high capacity super-channels are enabled by 500 Gb/s photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that enable the DTN-X platform to integrate wavelength division multiplexing super-channel transmission with up to 12 Tb/s of non-blocking optical transport network switching, providing seamless scaling as traffic requirements grow in the future.
“Content providers, such as Facebook, are adding long-haul capacity at a rapid pace,” said TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin. “According to our research, private network capacity in Europe has increased more than 8-fold between 2010 and 2014.”
