February 23, 2015 — MONROE, La. and HANOVER, Md. – CenturyLink, Inc.(NYSE: CTL) and Ciena Corporation (NYSE: CIEN) today announced that CenturyLink, the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S., has successfully delivered superchannel transmission speeds of one terabit per second (1 Tb/s) on a portion of its fiber network in central Florida.
CenturyLink conducted the live field test earlier this month on its existing network using Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical platformequipped with WaveLogic 3 16QAM-based coherent optics and Flexible Grid photonic layer. The terabit superchannel, composed of five 200 Gbps wavelengths closely packed together, more than doubled the network’s traffic carryingcapacity during the trial, demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of CenturyLink’s network.
“This 1 terabit per second trial complements the work we are doing to transform our network and prepares us to meet our customers’ growing bandwidth needs now and into the future,” said James Feger, vice president, CenturyLink network strategy and development. “Being able to quickly scale our network’s capacity to keep up with increasing bandwidth demands means that customers will continue to have a positive experience usingour cloud, hosted IT and high-speed broadband services, as well as video services like CenturyLink Prism TV.”
Spectral efficiency gains in the trial were achieved by using Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 based 16QAM coherent modulation, WaveLogic 3 spectral shaping, and Flexible Grid technologies.
“Ciena and CenturyLink have a long-standing relationship and this trial demonstrates the future-proof nature of Ciena’s high-capacity terabit optical technology, which is designed to help network operators adjust the latency and capacity of their networks so that they can thrive in today’s app-centric world,”said Francois Locoh-Donou, senior vice president, global products group, Ciena.
