New World Record in Transmission Achieved

Not long after IBM announced a new optical chip capable of 160GB per second transfer rates, Alcatel-Lucent comes into the scene with a new world record of 25.6 Terabits per second (Tb/s), crushing the previous record of 14 Tb/s, established in September 2006. The data was transmitted over a single fiber strand, using 160 Wavelength-Division Multiplexed (WDM) channels.

Romano Valussi, President of Alcatel-Lucent's Optics activities said: "Optical networking is a critical enabler of the broadband IP revolution we are seeing throughout the world today. The experience we are developing in these tests will help Alcatel-Lucent design the most efficient, highest bandwidth systems possible to benefit our customers when networks of this bandwidth will be deployed."

This is just one of the many achievements that the company is responsible for, being the first company to experiment with terabit transmissions, inventing the non-zero dispersion fiber (NZDF), the first ones that broke the 10 terabit transmission barrier over a single optical fiber, and more. This experimental transmission was carried over three 80km spans and used the wavelength division multiplexing in the Conventional and Long wavelength bands with polarization multiplexing to double the capacity.

In the experiment itself, researchers from Alcatel-Lucent have used and "advanced signaling format", called RZ-DQPSK (return to zero differential quadrature phase-shift keyed). This allowed them to realize a 3.2 bits/second/Hertz (b/s/Hz) of spectral efficiency, which also is a world breaking performance. Why is it such a big deal, because today's commercial systems operate at spectral efficiencies between 0.2 and 0.4b/s/Hz. Alcatel-Lucent is well known for providing end-to-end solutions in the communications domain and they work with a lot of different companies, service providers, enterprises and even governments.