Telstra, Ericsson and Ciena demo transpacific encryption at 100 Gbps

encryption
Image credit: Omelchenko / Shutterstock.com

Ericsson, Telstra and Ciena say they have successfully trialed continuous data encryption while maintaining speed and reliability over 21,940 km across multiple cable systems.

The engineering teams demonstrated the ability to encrypt data securely while in transit between Los Angeles and Melbourne at 100 Gbps, using Ciena’s ultra-low latency 100 Gigabit wire-speed encryption solution.

transpacific encryption at 100 Gbps
Image credit: Ericsson

While encryption solutions exist today to protect data when it is at rest – that is, at the start and end points – this trial demonstrates the security that can be delivered while data is in transit, across different networks, without any impact in performance.

With the digitalization of business processes and data consumption rapidly rising, the need to keep data secure without compromising integrity or significantly increasing latency is essential at both the application and network layers.

Organizations with higher security obligations, such as those in the finance, healthcare, defense, and government sectors, as well as data center operators, will be particularly interested in this new encryption technology, the companies said in a statement.

Darrin Webb, executive director of International Operations and Services at Telstra, said that testing this functionality is an essential step in the path towards commercialization so Telstra can be sure of service quality prior to deployment.

“This demonstration shows that customer services with large bandwidth requirements can be secured and data transported across virtually any distance and over an underlying network that uses multiple vendors,” Webb said. “This means we can provide service consistency regardless of the cable system used. Customers will also be able to protect their data not only at the application layer, but also at the network layer without any reduction in quality.”

“A series of advanced demonstrations such as these are necessary before any product is released commercially,” said Emilio Romeo, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand.

The 100-Gbps demo follows similar encryption tests conducted by Telstra, Ciena and Ericsson at lower speeds and distances, Romeo added. “In January 2015, we had success at 200 Gbps between Melbourne and Sydney, then with 10 Gbps speeds over the greater distance from Melbourne to Los Angeles in January this year. Now we have achieved 100 Gbps.”

Be the first to comment

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.