Spirent, InnoLight Partner to Demo 800G Ethernet Interoperability

Spirent Communications and InnoLight Technology has announced the validation of 800G optical transceiver interoperability. Vital to the next stage of high-speed Ethernet evolution, this latest interoperability success signals a further step towards 800G implementation.

InnoLight Technology is a leading global manufacturer of optical transceivers, and the project successfully demonstrated an 800G link up and line rate traffic transmission using IEEE 802.3ck OSFP for VSR application. InnoLight and Spirent engineers worked closely to develop and get the 800G link operational to emulate the traffic of hyperscale datacenters.

“We were delighted to work with Spirent to showcase this latest step towards 800G interoperability,” said Osa Mok, Chief Marketing Officer for InnoLight. “As vendor-agnostic test and measurement leaders, Spirent was able to help us create the environment to continuously test and validate the performance of our 800Gb/s OSFP DR8+ 2km SMP optical transceivers, which are such vital components of the future datacenter and cloud network ecosystem.”

New applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), digital reality, artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are driving network traffic to an unprecedented level. Spirent’s recent 2021 5G Report reinforced the point by highlighting that new 5G network rollouts, and the emerging apps that they bring with them, are adding still further to the already substantial internet capacity demands that necessitate ever-faster interconnection technology. Continuing innovation in optical solutions is needed by hyperscalers to support this fast-growing bandwidth demand and achieve greater efficiencies.

“We are seeing increasing demand from customers for 800G test solutions, and this partnership with InnoLight is a major step forward in proving interoperability and increasing customer confidence in this new technology,” said Abhitesh Kastuar, general manager, Cloud & IP, Spirent Communications. “We are working at the bleeding edge of current high-speed Ethernet technology development to enable our customers to design, develop and eventually deploy 800G technology, and this successful interoperability demonstration will give early adopters the confidence to accelerate design and development of their 800G capable next-gen devices.”

While 400G technology is still relatively new, customers are already looking to Spirent for new 800G test solutions, to validate high-density, higher power consuming applications, as the ecosystem looks to deliver even faster capabilities that can maximize capacity of existing space-limited physical locations.