As reported byCablinginstall.com's sister site, Lightwave, Nokia Siemens Networks announced last week that it had joined with several R&D partners in the MODE-GAP consortium to successfully transmit 57.6 Tbps through commercially deployed multimode fiber. The partners first announced the results of their experiment in a post-deadline paper at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in September. The demonstration used spatial multiplexing over solid-core multimode fiber.
“With this record data rate we can transmit, over a single fiber, double the capacity required for 7 billion people – the world’s population – to be connected over simultaneous phone calls,” claims Robert Richter, head of R&D optical networks at Nokia Siemens Networks. “But this is only the beginning," adds Richter. "By 2020, we will be able to support 100 times this capacity, which means that a single fiber would have enough capacity to deliver 40 million different TV streams – for example one for every household in Germany – simultaneously.”
The post-deadline paper was one of several presentations the MODE-GAP consortium offered at the ECOC show. The group, partially funded by the European Union under its seventh framework program, is investigating components, fiber, and digital signal processing concepts for high-data-rate communications, including spatial multiplexing over photonic band gap fibers in the 1.55-and 2-micrometer region.
“Nokia Siemens Networks is our preferred partner in the industry, as the company provides a crucial vision of system requirements and technology roadmaps,” said Prof. David J. Richardson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University, another MODE-GAP participant. “It was the system know-how of the Nokia Siemens Networks research team that made the record possible. Our university is very much looking forward to continuing this fruitful cooperation.”
See also: OFS exploring few-mode fibers for potential 10x bandwidth increase