Alcatel-Lucent Reports Optical Transmission Record: 16.4 Tbps over 2,550 km

In papers presented at this week's OFC/NFOEC conference in San Diego, Alcatel-Lucent reported optical networking milestones, including a new optical transmission record and three novel new photonic integrated circuits.


In a post deadline paper, Bell Labs researchers in its Villarceaux, France center, in partnership with Alcatel-Thales' III-V Lab and the optical solution company Kylia announced the successful transmission of 16.4 Terabits per second of optical data over 2,550 km. This transmission was achieved using 164 Wavelength-Division Multiplexed (WDM) channels modulated at 100 Gbps. The company said this represents a world record for capacity x distance at 41.8 Petabits/s.km.


Several new technologies were used, including a highly-linear, balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver and an ultra-compact, temperature-insensitive coherent mixer. This result is a critical step forward in enabling 100 Gbps Ethernet. It ensures the maximum exploitation of the fibre bandwidth to cope with future capacity needs, by providing very high information spectral density at 2bit/s/Hz.


Alcatel-Lucent also highlighted three other papers from Bell Labs researchers at Holmdel, NJ. They describe the development of three new photonic integrated circuits developed to achieve 100 Gbps with a high spectral efficiency. In the first of these papers researchers developed an integrated high-speed receiver using DQPSK modulation that is about 1,000 timers smaller than existing DQPSK receivers which are built out of discrete components. This new receiver could significantly lower the cost and size of 100 Gbps components. Another of these papers demonstrated a dual-polarization modulator with a 40 Gbps data stream in one polarization and a different 40 Gbps data stream in another one. This technique doubles the capacity of a link without requiring any additional bandwidth. The last paper in this series presents a modulator producing a 16-QAM signal format, used for systems with extremely high spectral efficiency. While this format is well known in wireless and satellite communications, its use in optics is new.http://www.alcatel-lucent.comhttp://www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/BellLabs