The world's longest terrestrial optical network route

Facebook's European terrestrial network stretches from its Lulea, Sweden, datacenter across major hubs throughout Europe. Facebook deployed the Infinera portfolio of products, which includes the DTN-X platform, to connect these hubs, harnessing Infinera’s unique FlexCoherent solution to deliver terabits of capacity on a single fiber across the continent.

Today, Facebook delivers to its European network 100Gb/s coherent transmission via 500Gb/s super-channels, featuring a forward-scale design to support 1.2Tb/s super-channels in the future. The high capacity super-channels are enabled by 500Gb/s PICs developed and fabricated by Infinera, the only supplier providing 500Gb/s of transmission capacity from a single line card.

PICs enable the DTN-X platform to integrate wavelength division multiplexing super-channel transmission with up to 12Tb/s of non-blocking optical transport network switching, providing seamless scaling as traffic requirements grow in the future. The DTN-X also features SDN-ready application programming interfaces that enable network programmability and automation of network operations to reduce both operational cost and service delivery times while facilitating new services.

"The Infinera Intelligent Transport Network makes it easy for us to rapidly grow network capacity while keeping operations simple,” said Niclas Comstedt, Director of Network Engineering, Facebook. “Once the equipment is in place we are able to turn up as many terabits as we need."

“Content providers, such as Facebook, are adding long-haul capacity at a rapid pace,” said Alan Mauldin, Research Director, TeleGeography. "According to our research, private network capacity in Europe has increased more than 8-fold between 2010 and 2014.”   

“I’ve worked closely with service providers around the world to test and deploy ultra-long-haul optical transport systems for over a decade,” said Steve Grubb, Fellow, Infinera. “The route we are announcing with Facebook is delivering multi-terabit capacity today and I believe this is the world’s longest 8Tb/s capable route in production.”

"Facebook's deployment of the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network underscores the value Infinera brings to internet content providers and datacenter operators around the world," said Tom Fallon, CEO, Infinera. "Facebook is a classic example of how leading internet content providers are building global networks that interconnect their datacenters to accelerate the delivery of high bandwidth, feature rich services worldwide.”