https://spectrum.ieee.org/fiber-optic-cable-recordNew Fiber Optics Tech Smashes Data Rate Record Expanded bandwidth
yields a transmission rate of 402 terabits per second.
Margo Anderson 08 Jul 2024
An international team of researchers have smashed the world record for fiber optic communications through commercial-grade fiber. By broadening fiber’s communication bandwidth, the team has produced data rates four times as fast as existing commercial systems—and 33 percent better than the previous world record.
The researchers’ success derives in part from their innovative use of optical amplifiers to boost signals across communications bands that conventional fiber optics technology today less-frequently uses. “It’s just more spectrum, more or less,” says Ben Puttnam, chief senior researcher at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Koganei, Japan.
Puttnam says the researchers have built their communications hardware stack from optical amplifiers and other equipment developed, in part, by Nokia Bell Labs and the Hong Kong-based company Amonics. The assembled tech comprises six separate optical amplifiers that can squeeze optical signals through C-band wavelengths—the standard, workhorse communications band today—plus the less-popular U-, L-, S-, E-, and O-bands. (E- and O- bands are in the near-infrared; while S-band, C-band, L-, and O-bands are in what’s called short-wavelength infrared.)
All together, the combination of O, E, S, C, L, and U bands enables the new technology to push a staggering 402 terabits per second (Tbps) through the kinds of fiber optic cables that are already in the ground and underneath the oceans. Which is impressive when compared to the competition.
“The world’s best commercial systems are 100 terabits per second,” Puttnam says. “So we’re already doing about four times better.” Then, earlier this year, a team of researchers at Aston University in the Birmingham, England boasted what at the time was a record-setting 301 Tbps using much the same tech as the joint Japanese-British work—plus sharing a number of researchers between the two groups.