

World record: 109 terabits per second over single optical fibre  - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/world-record-109-terabits-per-second-over-single-optical-fibre-2011053/

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danohuiginn
More impressive to me is that the first commercial fiber-optic system worked
at 45Mbps.

In 1975.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Back 25 years ago I worked for the phone company. I was excited to learn that
the way fiber works is essentially to carry multiple channels based on
divisions of _color_. Of course, when you stop to think about it, that's
precisely analogous to carrying multiple frequencies of radio, or audio (as
with a modem). But thinking of this in terms of multiple colors being
transmitted simultaneously really brought the point home.

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angdis
OK, but can you really call "one" fiber with "multiple" cores a "single"
optical fiber?

All the same, pretty amazing stuff.

The current state of the art in systems which are starting to get deployed now
is 100Gb/s per wavelength on a single optical fiber. Each fiber can carry 10's
of wavelengths.

These 100G systems can use existing fiber that was run for 10G systems. They
exploit more advanced modulation techniques than the old "on-off keying" used
in 10G.

Backbone carriers are starting to fill up the so-called "dark fiber" that was
over-supplied ~10 years ago. This is creating the demand for 100G and
eventually higher.

~~~
perlgeek
> OK, but can you really call "one" fiber with "multiple" cores a "single"
> optical fiber?

Depends on what they actually used.

There are special optical fibers with air holes (google for "photonic crystal
fibers"), if they produces such fibers to guide multiple modes independently,
you can really call it a single fiber.

If they used separate fibers within a single plastic cladding, you can argue
about that.

If they used multiple fibers separate plastic claddings, they probably would
have been shouted down at the conference where they presented their results
:-)

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perlgeek
Sadly it doesn't state the length of the first transmission channel. Length
multiplied with bit rate is the real figure of merit - and 165km * 102Tb/s is
really impressive.

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JoeAltmaier
Too expensive for my laptop.

