Alcatel achieves 100 Petabits per second.kilometer optical transmission

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GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham is reporting on a new long distance optical data transmission milestone achieved by the fine folks at Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent today said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables,  resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. …This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago.

…The transmissions were not just faster, they were accomplished over a network whose repeaters are 20 percent farther apart than commonly maintained in such networks,  which could decrease the costs of deploying such a network.

The new record is an order of magnitude better than the most advanced undersea cables in use today. Application to HPC? Not clear other than very generally in the long term, but still it’s cool technology.