Cisco and Microsoft partnered on an optical networking trial that beamed a signal at 800 Gb/s across the recently powered Amitié transatlantic communications cable. The trial was targeted at showing performance support for growing cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) services.

The test was conducted across the 6,234-kilometer long Amitié submarine cable that connects the United States, United Kingdom and France. The cable runs between Boston and Bordeaux, France, and uses space division multiplexing (SDM) technology and 16 fiber pairs, with repeater power shared across the fiber pairs.

The trial used Cisco’s NCS 1014 platform running Acacia Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8). The former can support speeds up to 2.4 Tb/s, while the latter can support speeds up to 1.2 Tb/s.

Specific performance metrics included the 800G speed accomplished in a 150-GHz channel spacing. The test also showed support for 600G speeds for a round-trip transmission, which the companies said was the “longest distance ever reported at single-carrier 600G DWDM [dense wavelength division multiplexing] transmission on an SDM cable.”

Bill Gartner, SVP of optical systems and optics at Cisco, noted in a statement tied to the news that “in the era of AI, reliable and fast network connections are more important than ever.”

That importance we reiterated by Ciena CTO Steve Alexander, who recently told SDxCentral in an interview that the growing use of AI is “certainly going to keep this 20, 30, 40% year-on-year growth that we always see. You see it in submarine cables, you see it in metro builds, you see it in broadband.”

“There's a huge amount of attention being paid to AI and ML [machine learning]. Everybody's building capability,” Alexander added. “The networks are there to support getting information that they want to train on to the machines, getting the results back and then out into the hands of the folks that want it.”

Initial work on the submarine cable began in 2020, and was completed last year. Companies involved in the deployment and management included Orange, Vodafone, Meta, Aqua Comms and Microsoft.

The cable is now part of Microsoft’s global network supporting all Microsoft services.

The latest trial follows on several Cisco has conducted using a similar platform with fiber providers.

Cisco last month partnered with U.S. fiber operator Windstream for a “hero experiment” (tests that show raw capabilities) that used disaggregated equipment to produce terabit speeds over a 1,100-kilometer link of Windstream’s Intelligent Converged Optical Network (ICON) in the Southeast.

Gartner told SDxCentral at that time that the test highlighted the robustness of disaggregated networking technology.

“We’ve carried the signal over really tremendous amount of capacity over very long distance, terabit have capacity over 1,100 kilometers, and demonstrated that their network is really robust in terms of being able to carry these latest generation signals,” Gartner said.

The Windstream test was also similar to one Cisco conducted with Verizon late last year. That test used similar Cisco-Acacia equipment to push data across the Cisco NCS 2000 line system already installed by Verizon.

Gartner said the “key message” from both tests was “that the latest and greatest technology can be carried over the existing infrastructure that’s been deployed.”

“The layer 0 infrastructure that they deploy, the optical line systems, are capable of carrying these very advanced terabit-class transponders,” Gartner said.