Telstra Wholesale and Aussie Broadband team up for 400Gbps services trial

L-R: Steve Long (Telstra Wholesale), John Reisinger (Aussie Broadband)

Telstra Wholesale and Aussie Broadband have come together to trial 400Gbps services, opening up the latter’s capacity by up to 400 per cent.

The pair have been trialling the delivery of live 400GE client services on two diverse links between Sydney and Melbourne via multiple data centres along a coastal and inland fibre path.

As a result, customers can expect to access 400Gbps services from April. Meanwhile, Telstra will be offering 400Gbps wavelength services on other inter-capital routes later this year.

Steve Long, executive at Telstra Wholesale, said the collaboration was made possible due to their “deep working relationship” with Aussie Broadband.

“Data traversing over the Telstra fixed network has tripled since 2017 and continues to grow at about 25 per cent each year,” he said.

“Leveraging Telstra’s diverse fibre network, together with our experience in backhaul services, we can tailor backhaul solutions to help future proof our customers’ networks and businesses helping them manage their end users’ ever growing data needs.”

John Reisinger, CTO and co-founder at Aussie Broadband, said the internet provider was able to take on Telstra Wholesale’s native 400Gbps wavelengths, rather than the stacking of multiple 100Gbps services.

Additionally, he also said Aussie Broadband is looking at acquiring more links as capacity demand increases.

“As our nationwide network rapidly grows, the new backbone capacity lets us serve increased traffic demands while simplifying the heart of our network,” he said.

“The additional capacity helps Aussie better handle localised content network outages, which can sometimes result in hundreds of gigabits per second having to be carried to alternate locations.”

The 400Gbps services were made possible through telco networking equipment and software services vendor Ciena via Ericsson, specifically with its 6500-Packet-Optical Platform powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5E) programmable 800Gbps coherent technology.

The most recent statistics from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about internet providers, which were released in December, revealed Aussie Broadband increased its market share during the September quarter in 2022 by 0.3 per cent. Meanwhile, Telstra dropped 0.6 per cent.

Meanwhile, in August 2021, Aussie Broadband signed a five-year Telstra Wholesale deal for the provision of backhaul capacity between 42 National Broadband Network (NBN) points of interconnect (POI) and data centre connectivity not covered by Aussie Broadband’s own fibre network.