MTN & Huawei Break Transmission Speed Record in First Commercial Trial of Single-wavelength 800G in South Africa

MTN South Africa recently announced that it had completed the first commercial trial of single-wavelength 800G with Huawei in South Africa, breaking the transmission speed record in the region.

This achievement represents a major industry milestone in telecommunications networks, showcasing the ability of fiber networks to deliver an overall capacity of transmission network of up to 48 Tbit/s. The test applied Huawei’s latest OXC all-optical switching product to build an optical transport network with high scalability to address the medium- and long-term challenges brought by data centers and revolutionary services.

With the rapid increase of service traffic between data centers, traffic pressures on transport networks are increasing. MTN hopes to build an all-optical city with advanced communications infrastructure that can cope with the increase in traffic and services and help enterprises on the digital transformation journey. After working with Huawei to jointly deploy single-wavelength 400G technology, MTN chose Huawei again to implement the first commercial trial of 800G+OXC in South Africa.

The 800G technology will address MTN’s growing demand for capacity prompted by the current shift towards online digital behavior, cloud-based business services, enhanced home broadband, and wireless networks. MTN is leading the transport network industry with this latest innovative solution and early technology adoption. This achievement emphasizes the promise to deliver the best-in-class and most advanced robust network in South Africa.

The interconnection of data centers also increases the optical direction of the core nodes, which increases O&M difficulties. MTN has applied OXC technology to backbone nodes. With the industry-leading Lcos switching technology and 32-dimensional optical cross-connection grooming, MTN can easily meet long-term capacity and degree-expansion requirements. The operator has made great breakthroughs in single-wavelength bandwidth, and based on the adoption of 800G and optical-layer innovation, its optical networks are closer to enabling agile transmission network modes that can quickly adapt to external changes and respond to customer service requirements.

On its NMS (Network Management System), MTN has applied the latest Huawei NCE-T to boost management, control, and analysis capabilities on transport networks and provide differentiated services for various types of customers through visualized parameters like the latency and reliability maps. Meeting the requirements of customers in different vertical industries will accelerate the digital transformation process of enterprises in South Africa.

“The 800G+OXC trial with Huawei is a result of MTN’s leadership vision of Digital Tomorrow of ‘Driving the digital future to empower societies’. MTN is proud on having one of the world’s advanced networks and using industry leading technology to deliver superior network services for our customers across South Africa.

With the 800G+OXC solution, we are able to deliver more data for every wavelength, and build an optimal cost-per-bit all optical cross connect network to enable best-in-class one hop transmission customer experience. This trial will further strengthen MTN’s efforts to build one of the most advanced and robust networks.”

Vice President of Network Development at MTN

Further Reading

• MTN Group Boosts User Experience with PremiumWi-Fi [article]
• Huawei Carrier Business Group [product page]
• OXC Revival: New-generation Optical Switching for Tomorrow’s Networks [guest article by Heavy Reading]
• 800G: The Next Step Forward for Optical Networks [guest article by Omdia]

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.