Windstream Holdings and Infinera laid claim to an industry first in a recent 400GbE trial. The trial paired 400GbE with client-side services with commercially available 400GbE-LR8 QSFP-DD compact pluggable interfaces.
The trial used Infinera’s commercially available 2x 600G Wavelength muxponder on its Groove (GX) G30 Compact Modular Platform with the CHM-2T sled, which enabled the customer-facing 400GbE service to be transmitted using a single-carrier 600G wavelength.
Pluggables are a significant trend across the optical space as web-scale companies, service providers and data center operators look to deploy some 400G gear this year and even more next year.
