BT and Huawei have announced field trial speeds of up to 3 Tbps, believed to be the fastest real-time super channel speeds ever achieved over an existing fibre link using commercial grade hardware and software in a real world operational environment. The speeds are the equivalent to transmitting around 100 uncompressed HD films in a single second. The record transmission, which was conducted over a 359 kilometre fibre link between BT's Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk and the BT Tower in London, used an advanced 'Flexgrid' infrastructure with Huawei's OSN 9800/8800 and iManager U2000 platform. This approach increases the capacity on a fibre cable by compressing the gaps between transmission channels, usually set at 50GHz. The technique increases the density of channels on a fibre, making it around 50 percent more efficient than today's typical core network links.
