According to a story by Margo Anderson in IEEE Spectrum this week, a new world record for fiber optics data rate has been set – 33 percent better than the previous record and 4x faster than commercial systems.
An international research team reports transmitting data at a “staggering” 402 terabits per second (Tbps) using commercial-grade fiber, “the kinds of fiber optic cables that are already in the ground and underneath the oceans,” according to the July 8 article.
Key to the researchers’ success is their utilization of “optical amplifiers” that “boost signals across communications bands.” “It’s just more spectrum, more or less,” said Ben Puttnam, chief senior researcher at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Koganei, Japan. “The world’s best commercial systems are 100 terabits per second. We’re already doing about four times better.”
Puttnam told IEEE the researcher team built their communications capability from equipment developed partly by Nokia Bell Labs and Amonics of Hong Kong. The technology includes six optical amplifiers that can push optical signals through C-band wavelengths, the standard communications band , along with the less-popular U-, L-, S-, E-, and O-bands, according to IEEE.
Combining and pushing signals across all six bands enabled the 402 Tbps data rate.
Puttnam also said 600 Tbps with existing cables could be attainable. “If you really push everything, if you filled in all the gaps, and you had every channel the highest quality you can arrange, then probably 600 [Tbps] is the absolute limit,” he said.
Puttnam told IEEE that the key to the research project “is the inherent utility of this tech for existing commercial-grade fiber.”
“Adding more wavelength bands is something that you can do without digging up fibers,” Puttnam said. “You might ideally just change the ends, the transceiver—the transmitter and the receiver. Or maybe halfway, you’d want to change the amplifiers. And that’s the most you would [need to] do.”
