Vodacom South Africa and Nokia are working together to transform the operator’s nationwide optical transmission network through Nokia’s Photonic Service Engine 3 (PSE-3) chipset hardware to deliver high capacity transmission.
Through a recent field trial, the companies achieved the highest data transmission rates and performance across their live optical network, demonstrating a significant increase in transmission network capacity for Vodacom South Africa.
The deployment of the Nokia 1830 Photonic Service Switch will assist Vodacom South Africa in maintaining high quality data services across the country, to both address the ongoing surge in data traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The nationwide optical network will connect all major South African cities, large data centres and network hubs.
The live network trial successfully established a high-capacity 500Gbps link between regional data centres in Midrand and a 300Gbps link over a long-distance route between Cape Town and Midrand. This was achieved without any electrical regeneration on a route that spans more than 1600 kilometres.
Nokia PSE-3 is powered by Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), a concept pioneered by Nokia Bell Labs, which allows for the extraction of as much capacity as possible over an optical channel. It enables maximizing the performance and capacity of every link in the optical network.
Nokia's wavelength routing technology is powered by a Colorless, Directionless, Contentionless with FlexGrid (CDC-F) optical switch architecture. It is a high performance non-blocking optical switch architecture for maximum performance. Nokia high-capacity muxponder (S4X400) was used during the trial over the live network. The solution can seamlessly be deployed on Vodacom’s network for high-performance applications over metro, regional, and long-haul optical networks.
Beverly Ngwenya, Technology Director at Vodacom South Africa
Initiatives such as these will ensure that our customers continue to enjoy a high quality network service while also allowing Vodacom to optimise its network resources to support the increase in demand for data connectivity services and for the expansion of our 5G network in future.
Roque Lozano, VP of IP and Optics for the Middle East and Africa market at Nokia
Our solution will support the operator in meeting the ever-growing demand for more capacity that comes with 5G, fiber-to-the-home and Enterprise DCI, maximizing its optical network's performance with highly reliable and flexible new services.
