Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks and Nokia Bell Labs have achieved 65 Terabit-per-second transmission capacity — over a 6,600 km single mode fiber.
The Nokia-owned technology company hopes that the lab trial’s record transmission using submarine grade dual band erbium doped fiber amplifiers will help extend the capability of transoceanic cable systems to meet data traffic demand.
The trial used Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS) technology by Bell Labs with a new modulation technique to maximize the distance and capacity of high-speed transmission in optical networks.
Traditional techniques have all constellation symbols transmitting together with PCS for non-uniform transmission of constellation symbols by reducing the occurrence of high power symbols and providing resilience to noise and other impairments alongside adapting to changing conditions.
Telecom and webscale operators can enhance the capacity of undersea cable systems to address increasing consumer and business data traffic demands.
The capacity of 65 Tb/s is equal to 10 million HDTV channels streamed simultaneously which is 13,000 times the capacity available on the first undersea amplified transatlantic system installed in 1995.
“Probabilistic Constellation Shaping extends the limits of current optical transmission by utilizing novel modulation techniques to dramatically improve the performance and capacity needed for the new digital era that will be enabled by the Future X Network,” said Marcus Weldon, president, Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia CTO.
Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom and the Technical University of Munich collaborated on the PCS technology in September to achieve speeds of 1 Tb per second per channel over Deutsche Telekom terrestrial optical network.
The results of the trial took place at the Europe Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) 2016 in Dusseldorf, Germany.
Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks leads the industry in terms of capacity and installed base with more than 580,000 km of optical submarine cables/systems deployed.
The submarine fiber cable market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.75 percent during the period 2016-2020.
Nokia, which officially took control of Alcatel-Lucent in January 2016, aims to realize annual cost synergies of €1.2 billion from the deal by 2018.
Vina Krishnan
editor@telecomlead.com
