Alcatel-Lucent researchers have set a new trans-oceanic speed record of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer, or 100 million Gbps.kilometer.
A Bell Labs team in Villarceaux, France sent “the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers” – ten times faster than today’s most advanced subsea systems, the company said.
They used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100Gbps to boost the performance of standard WDM kit. Network repeaters were spaced 90 kilometers apart, 20% further than the standard deployment in subsea networks, Alca-Lu said.
“There is no question that this record-breaking transmission is a milestone in achieving the network capacity and speeds and a key step forward in satisfying the ongoing explosion in demand,” said Gee Rittenhouse, head of Bell Labs Research.
The transmission speed was derived by multiplying the number of lasers by their 100Gbps rate and then multiplying the aggregate 15.5 Tbps result by the 7000-kilometer distance achieved. The combination of speed and distance expressed in “bit per second.kilometers” is a standard measure for high-speed optical transmission.
The researchers also increased capacity through a new technique called “coherent detection”, which enabled them to increase the number of light sources introduced into a single fiber while still separating the light into its constituent colors at the destination.
The researchers presented their findings in a research paper to a post-deadline session of the European optical conference ECOC, held in Vienna last week.