Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs unit has broken a new record for the amount of data that can be transmitted over trans-oceanic distances over one optical fibre. In a test carried out at the group’s Innovation City campus in Villarceaux near Paris, researchers from Bell Labs successfully sent data at speeds of 31 Tbps over 7,200 km, a capacity three times that of the most advanced commercial undersea cables in use today. The span between amplifiers was 100 km over the whole length.
The experiment leveraged Bell Labs’ work in 200 Gbps single-carrier data channels, first presented at the 2011 European Conference on Optical Communications conference.
Alcatel-Lucent said its research teams overcame challenges of signal distortion and noise at such speeds and distances by using innovative detection techniques as well as combining advanced error correcting coding with modulation, transmission and signal processing technologies.
The experiment used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 200G over a 50GHz frequency grid to improve on the performance of today's 100G WDM systems.
Details of the experiment were presented in a post-deadline paper presented earlier this month at the Opto-Electronic Communication Conference conference in Japan.
