A record has been broken and some feat of derring-do in the telecoms industry is promised. Is it some sort of cell mast climbing endurance record? Maybe some speed trenching as part of a cable installation? Is it: how many customers can one call centre operative cause to utter a stream of four-letter words in a single afternoon?

None of those.

Infinera and DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) have achieved a Guinness World Record for the fastest rate of provisioning multi-Terabit optical capacity across the GÉANT Network.

The companies claim they were able to install and activate eight Terabits per second (Tb/s) of long haul super-channel optical capacity, enough capacity to simultaneously stream 1.6 million high-definition movies in each direction. This capacity was activated across the GÉANT production network in 19 minutes and 1 second after plugging in the first line card.

The record was set using an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network, featuring the DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform, deployed on the GÉANT backbone across a long distance link from Vancis Amsterdam, The Netherlands to GlobalConnect in Hamburg.

Movies?

The high speed network measure of choice used to be simultaneous telepohone calls or complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica transmitted. How times change.