Vodafone says it has completed
a successful trial of Facebook's new white box transponder, Voyager. The company stated that the trial, done on a live network in Spain, demonstrates the viability of running the optical transponder hardware through a software-based networking system.
The trial showed that the Voyager could achieve optical commissioning and optical real-time monitoring at 200 Gbps. It also provided a capacity of 800 Gbps per rack unit over an existing optical infrastructure.
"We wanted to show how Voyager's variable-rate transceivers can be used to match speeds and modulation formats with actual line conditions," Santiago Tenorio Sanz, head of network strategy and architecture at Vodafone, said in
a blog post. "Thanks to a streamlined network operating system and SDN [software-defined networking] automation, we showed how our live network can set up optical services and keep them running, reduce unnecessary and lengthy customer service interruptions, and improve network utilization."