MTN, Africa’s largest telecommunications operator and Huawei announced the successful live trial of a Transport Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and 2.4Tbit/s wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system. This trial is currently the fastest and most intelligent optical network to date in the industry in Africa.

The successful trial demonstrated the advanced optical transport system with bandwidth capacities far beyond the existing 100G technology which will benefit next generation of mobile and internet services which Africa is already demanding.

Future-proof transport networks
Mr.Navi Naidoo, Group Technology Officer, MTN, said: “With this successful field trial, we have demonstrated our commitment to digital innovation. MTN continues to invest in future-proof transport networks to realize world class technologies, not only to our existing markets, but to extend our technology offerings globally. We believe that networks such as cloud computing, streaming media and mobile broadband must be scalable, intelligent and flexible. To this end, Huawei’s next generation optical evolution concept ‘SDN-based flex optical network’ properly fits our requirements.”