NEC awarded the Telecom Infra Project’s "Silver Badge"

• 12 Oct 2023
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

NEC Corporation has been awarded a Requirements Compliant Silver Badge for a 400G transponder solution in support of the Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP) Phoenix initiative for developing a transponder architecture that will promote the use of disaggregated, open hardware and software.

TIP is a global community of companies and organizations that work together to develop, test and deploy open, disaggregated and standards-based solutions.

The Phoenix solution was defined by TIP’s Open Optical and Packet Transport (OOPT) project group, which is an operator-driven initiative for the development of open technologies, architectures and interfaces in the Optical and IP networking domain. Phoenix is the result of operators NTT, Telia, Telefonica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and MTN collaborating closely throughout development of the solution, from specifying the technical requirements to evaluating solution compliance through TIP’s testing and validation process.

Phoenix is a white box L0/L1 transponder that operators can deploy on their existing optical line systems to increase network capacity. It is based on disaggregated hardware and software components and is capable of line interface speeds of 400G. NEC’s solution consists of the NEC Network Operating System (NOS), based on Goldstone open-source software, running on Wistron’s Galileo Flex-T hardware, and interoperable with various transceivers that are compliant with OpenROADM and OIF specifications.

In order to be awarded a TIP Requirements Compliant Silver Badge, products must be tested by network operators. MTN, one of the largest mobile network operators in Africa, and NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), one of the largest telecom companies in the world, contributed to test execution and report submission.

Demonstrating its commitment to innovation, MTN embraced this state-of-the-art technology, integrating it into its production network, specifically, across its optical network between Johannesburg and Centurion in South Africa, further demonstrating the technology's interoperability and backwards compatibility. Field equipment installation and system integration were performed by NEC XON, which is a leading pan-African ICT-systems integrator.

NTT Com built a long-distance fiber transmission system in a lab environment and tested the reachability of various transmission rates. In order to test and confirm the reachability of various transmission rates, NTT Com constructed 13 spans of 80km transmission lines with Single Mode Fiber using NEC's DW7000 ROADM system, and connected Phoenix transponders to both ends, resulting in transmission across 560km at 400G and 1,040km at 200G.