ADVA Optical Networking Wins Celtic-Plus Award for Key Role in SASER Project

ADVA Optical Networking announced today that it has been named the winner of the 2016 Celtic-Plus Excellence Award in the Category of Network Technologies, alongside the other participants in the Safe and Secure European Routing (SASER) project. SASER’s consortium of multinational partners was recognized at an award ceremony in Stockholm for its contribution to making communication networks in Europe faster, more secure and more cost-effective. The SASER ADVAntage-Net sub-project, which was coordinated by ADVA Optical Networking, was successful in its goal of developing flexible modulation formats to improve spectral efficiency for data center interconnect (DCI) transport.

“The sub-project we’ve been leading, ADVAntage-Net, had one clear goal. That was to enhance the flexibility of metro and enterprise networks. Through a lot of close collaboration we’ve managed to achieve this aim and more,” said Michael Eiselt, director, advanced technology, ADVA Optical Networking. “We’ve developed unique transmission technologies to flexibly adapt modulation formats and enable network operators to trade off capacity and reach. This helps to optimize the cost per bit of DCI transport in an ever-increasing capacity environment. What’s more, we’ve been able to secure optical transmission in those networks by adding encryption technology at the physical layer.”

Funded by German, French and Finnish governments, SASER was the Celtic-Plus research initiative’s flagship project. It combined the work of major telecommunication system vendors and network operators with research institutes and several European universities. Now, through the Excellence Award for Network Technologies, Celtic-Plus is recognizing the impressive quantity and quality of SASER’s results and the business importance of SASER for Europe. The ADVAntage-Net cluster led by ADVA Optical Networking played a key role in improving the granularity of spectral bandwidths and taking network security to a new level. The collaborative research has already helped create novel direct detect technology for secure and cost-effective transmission of data rates as high as 400Gbit/s over distances up to 80km.

“I’m very proud of what our cluster achieved. With the help of our university and research center partners, we’ve taken some very significant steps and proved that it’s possible to use the available optical spectrum far more efficiently,” commented, Stephan Rettenberger, VP, marketing and investor relations, ADVA Optical Networking. “Our findings will increase the amount of data that can be transmitted over existing networks as granularities as low as 25GHz can now be utilized. It’s also fantastic that so many students were able to play a major role in making these breakthroughs. Projects like this help create the next generation of engineers and I’m pleased to say that we’ve already taken on several students from projects like SASER to begin their career at ADVA Optical Networking.”