Prysmian Group, Nokia Bell Labs and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) on Jan. 19 announced a record-setting 1 Petabit per second transmission over an optical fiber with standard dimensions.
The partners said their record-setting experiment combines highly spectral efficient wideband optical transmission with an optical fiber guiding 15 spatial modes and the use of specific mode multiplexers. The total capacity of the network was measured at 1 Petabit per second, corresponding to simultaneous 8K-TV broadcasting for 10 million people, according to the partners.
Specifically, per a press statement:
The group of researchers from the Network System Research Institute of the NICT, Nokia Bell Labs, and Prysmian Group’s Optical Fibre Business Unit succeeded in the world’s first space division multiplexed transmission exceeding 1 Petabit per second in a fiber with standard cladding (125µm) and coating (245µm) diameters.
This increases the previous data-rate records in fibers with standard dimensions by 5.7 times (single-mode fiber), by 2.5 times (few-mode fiber) and by 1.7 times (multi-core fiber). The results of this study were accepted for the prestigious post-deadline session at the 46th European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC, December 2020), one of the largest international conferences related to optical fiber communication.
The success of large-capacity transmission using a single-core few-mode fiber, which has a high spatial signal density and is easy to manufacture, is expected to advance high-capacity transmission technology. This could be used in telecom and data networks, from long-reach to short-reach applications, where density and capacity of standard single-mode technology reach a plateau.
“Over the past decade, data traffic has increased by a factor of ~100," explained Eric Stoltz, VP Optical Fibre BU at Prysmian Group. "Fiber capacity has closely followed this exponential growth, thanks to the introduction of new technologies. Data traffic is expected to keep growing at a similar exponential rate during the next decade, notably due to development of social networks, video on demand and mobile multimedia platforms. In this context, space division multiplexing has been recognized as the unique multiplexing technology able to meet this capacity challenge."
