Livingston assists DANTE in obtaining Guinness World Record

Test equipment sourcing specialist Livingston has played an integral part in the setting of new a Guinness World Record. Its client DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) has, using Livingston sourced equipment, been able to achieve the fastest ever rate for implementing multi-Terabit optical capacity.

DANTE, which builds and operates high speed communication infrastructure for research institutions throughout Europe, achieved this feat on the GÉANT network, which is based on the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform from Infinera. GÉANT is the largest research and education communications network in Europe. It has 50 million users located at 10,000 different academic and government research establishments across the continent (including such highly regarded ones as CERN in Switzerland). With the need to provide large amounts of data to such a huge number of users, in order to support vital scientific studies and investigations, it is critical that DANTE can bring additional capacity online rapidly.

In setting the new record, DANTE managed to install and activate a staggering 8Terabits/s of long haul super-channel optical capacity in just 19mins, 1sec. Validation of this was carried out using an EXFO FTB-85100G 100Gbit Ethernet tester and an EXFO FTB-5240S optical spectrum analyser. These key items of equipment, which were supplied by Livingston, provided the breadth of functionality and high degree of repeatability needed to ensure accurate test results.