This new record is the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 1.5 million YouTube videos – which is four times the market’s approximate 400Gbps.
“It has been 50 years since the inventions of the low-loss fibre and the associated optics,” said Marcus Weldon, Nokia CTO and president of Nokia Bell Labs. “From the original 45Mbps systems to more than 1Tbps systems of today – a more than 20,000-fold increase in 40 years – to create the fundamental underpinning of the internet and the digital societies as we know it.
Previously, the highest single-carrier bitrate at 1.52Tbps was set by a Nokia Bell Labs optical research team led by Fred Buchali. This record was established by employing a new 128 Gigasample/second converter enabling the generation of signals at 128 Gbaud symbol rate and information rates of the individual symbols beyond 6.0 bits/symbol/polarisation. This accomplishment breaks the team’s own record of 1.3Tbps set in September 2019 while supporting Nokia’s field trial with Etisalat.
“The role of Nokia Bell Labs has always been to push the envelope and redefine the limits of what’s possible. Our latest world records in optical research are yet another proof point that we are inventing even faster and more robust networks that will underpin the next industrial revolution,” said Wheldon.
Additionally, Nokia Bell Labs researcher Di Che and team also set a new data-rate world record for directly modulated lasers (DML), which are important for low-cost, high-speed applications such as data centre connections. The DML team achieved a world record data rate beyond 400Gbps for links up to 15km.
A number of other milestones have been met by the Nokia Bell Labs team including:
The first field trial using spatial-division-multiplexed (SDM) cable over a 2,000km span of 4-core coupled-core fibre was achieved by researchers Roland Ryf and the SDM team.
The introduction of a novel new set of modulation formats that provide improved linear and nonlinear transmission performance at subsea distances of 10,000km, led by Rene-Jean Essiambre, Roland Ryf and Murali Kodialam.
Researcher Junho Cho and team experimentally demonstrated capacity gains of 23% for subsea cable systems that operate under electrical supply power constraints.
