Nokia unveils next gen OTN architecture

Nokia has announced a wide range of upgrades for its next-generation packet optical transport network (P-OTN) solutions needed by CSPs offering wholesale services.

Upgrades to Nokia’s 1830 PSS-x solutions include a doubling of switching capacity up to a market-leading 48Tb/s, new wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) uplinks based on Nokia’s fifth-generation Photonic Service Engines (PSE-V) and expanding the range of wholesale service options with new client interfaces supporting 400GE service transport, and a wide range of hard and soft isolation features for network slicing.

According to Ian Redpath, Practice Leader for Transport Networks at Omdia, coherent port bandwidth grew by 49% to 227 Pbps in 2021, providing significant opportunities for Communication Service Providers to offer new services and grow revenue through wholesale service delivery. The wholesale business model can support deterministic end-to-end services across both traditional services and new segments such as mobile network slicing and backhaul, data center interconnect, wholesale transport for retail CSPs and business customers, smart power grids and residential broadband backhaul, who all bring their own requirements in speed, latency, availability and security.

Service providers need to be able to easily scale capacity and support a wide range of existing and emerging protocols, while delivering guaranteed service level performance and security over a shared network infrastructure. OTN uses a digital wrapper to encapsulate TDM and packet services, providing a robust and efficient transport protocol ensuring hard isolation between different users across a common infrastructure. This proven optical transport technology helps CSPs scale their networks with more capacity and new service options, while ensuring the ability to meet strict SLAs demanded by end users.

James Watt, Head of Optical Networks Division, Nokia, said: “We are excited to offer advanced capacity scaling and extended service offerings to our 250+ 1830 PSS-x customers, while also enabling new service capabilities across the entire CSP wholesale market. Our new upgrades provide comprehensive options for flexible OTN switch fabric capacity scaling, support higher speed line interfaces, provide new wholesale services and enable hard traffic isolation, all critical features for a composable and future-proof network.”

Jan Flemming Henriksen, Head of Optics, Global Connect, said: “By using OTN switching, we are able to offer our customers high capacity 400GE DCI services, while also improving our ability to support our classic low capacity services in the future, with new high availability options, increasing the service reliability.”

Wilfrid Puyo, Product Manager, Optical Transport at Swisscom, said: “Nokia’s OTN architecture and WaveSuite automation tools help us efficiently deliver existing 100Mb links in large numbers, and soon expand that to 400Gb links to meet the rising traffic demand for our fixed-mobile convergent networks, while guaranteeing our customers the level of service they demand with relative ease.”

Juan Jose Marfil Marquez, Director IP and Optical Networks, Telefonica Spain, commented on Nokia’s new architecture: “OTN and DWDM give us tremendous flexibility to scale networks in-step with our end customer needs for capacity, reliability and application. It allows us to be responsive to our customer’s needs.”

Alberto Maria Langellotti, Head of IP, Transport & SDN Engineering, TIM Italy, noted: “We see a great opportunity in using OTN as it enriches the value of our already performing photonic network, enabling the support of premium services for wholesale service providers and enterprises, ensuring to our customers high service level performance and security, as well as providing an efficient and scalable way to support TDM service replacement.”