ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has conducted the country’s first trial of one-terabit — one trillion bits or pieces of binary data — transport capacity per wavelength, the company said in a press release on Wednesday.

The trial was conducted in collaboration with Nokia in a live network environment, where PTCL Metro Transport Network was upgraded to one terabit per channel, extending its capacity to extreme speeds of 32 terabits per fibre.

One terabit per second is enough bandwidth to download the entire Game of Thrones video series in HD in less than two seconds and support 300,000 HD video zoom calls simultaneously.

The trial was based on Nokia’s Photonic Service Engine Transport Technology, designed to maximise network capacity and provide better customer experience, with faster and higher bandwidth, the press release said.

“This pilot transformation will lead to transport network enablement for future technologies while creating new opportunities for industries as well as individuals,” it said. “This is yet another step on PTCL’s road map and resolve to prepare its network infrastructure for embracing the growing data traffic demands of high-speed services and bandwidth intensive applications, including ultra-HD video streaming, industrial automation, smart cities and e-learning platforms for its subscribers and enterprise customers.”

Jafar Khalid, the chief technology officer at PTCL Group, said digitising the customer experience would facilitate the ever-growing data traffic demand of corporate and consumer segments.

“Nokia’s modern technology and expertise has helped the PTCL to test bandwidths up to one terabit, that will help provide a superior customer experience and enable seamless future expansion of our transport network capacity across Pakistan,” Mr Khalid said.

The PTCL has said that the Flexgrid architecture allowed PTCL to modernise and upgrade its optical network to provide individuals and enterprises with “a fast and reliable network connectivity”.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2022