Technical Insight
Alcatel breaks the 10 Tbit/s barrier (Fiber News)
Alcatel has exceeded the 10 Tbit/s barrier, setting the record for transmission capacity over a single optical fiber. This data rate is the equivalent of 160 million phone calls per second or over one million ASDL Internet connections per second. In another demonstration, the company transmitted 3 Tbit/s (300 channels 10 Gbit/s) over a 7300 km span a distance equivalent of Japan to Hawaii. The results were obtained at Alcatel s lab and presented during the recent OFC conference in Anaheim, California. Alcatel employed its Teralight fiber to demonstrate the unidirectional transmission over 256 channels, each one modulated at a rate of 40 Gbit/s, reaching a total throughput of 10.2 Tbit/s over a distance of 100 km. This is almost twice as much data as was transmitted in a demonstration by Alcatel last year (Compound Semiconductor Sep/Oct 2000, p43). Alcatel performed the error-free transmission using dual-stage hybrid Erbium/Raman amplifiers operating at 40 Gbit/s data rates with forward-error correction.