Realization of World Record Fiber-Capacity of 2.15Pb/s Transmission

Promising technology for long-haul high-capacity ransmission employing single-mode multi-core fiber and optical frequency comb source

October 13, 2015

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. (Sumitomo Electric), and RAM Photonics, LLC (RAM) set the new world record fiber-capacity of 2.15Pb/s, which advances over the previous record by more than a factor of two. Amid worldwide active studies on multi-core fibers as promising transmission media for ultra-high capacity, 31km-long transmission was experimentally demonstrated through a homogeneous 22-core single-mode multi-core fiber using a high performance optical frequency comb source that is able to simultaneously generate multiple signal wavelengths covering the entire C and L bands.

Demonstrated transmission experiments are boosting the realization of future ultra-high capacity digital coherent optical networks. The paper on this study was accepted and presented as a post-deadline paper at the 41st European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC2015). The presented paper was regarded as the best post-deadline paper and was awarded the Nature Photonics Award.

A transmission capacity through an optical fiber must increase to keep pace with explosively growing telecommunication traffic. In order to expand fiber-capacity, new class of optical fibers including multi-core fibers and space division multiplexing (SDM) transmission using these fibers have been actively studied among global research institutes. Recently in NICT, various cutting-edge studies on multi-core fibers and their devices, as well as SDM transmission, have been energetically executed.

In this transmission experiment, NICT, Sumitomo Electric, and RAM demonstrated promising features of multi-core fibers and frequency comb sources to be applied in future ultrahigh capacity optical communication systems with digital coherent technologies. In an effort to deploy practical SDM/WDM transmission technologies, future research studies will continue to be executed.