NEC's subsidiary OCC Corporation and Sumitomo Electric Industries have completed the first trial of uncoupled 4-core submarine fiber cable, and verified its transmission performance to meet the exacting demands of global telecommunications networks.
The uncoupled 4-core fiber is being deployed within the OCC SC500 series LW (Lightweight) cable, which has a 17mm outer diameter and withstands 8,000 meter water depth. This cable can accommodate up to 32 fibers. With multicore fiber, the number of cores can be increased without increasing the cable diameter, with corresponding benefits in the cost per bit of the cable system.
NEC and OCC have demonstrated that the cable's optical transmission performance in the water fully meets the exacting requirements of modern long-haul submarine cables. They further showed that the process of cabling Sumitomo Electric's multicore fiber has no effect on its optical characteristics, achieving excellent attenuation properties.
This research was supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), Japan, under the initiative "Research and Development of Innovative Optical Network Technology for a Novel Social Infrastructure" (JPMI00316).
