Although high-speed wireless technologies like Wifi 6E and 5G dominate news headlines, analog, and optical cables are still the core of the internet. A real-world implementation is possible, and not just a laboratory setting, because researchers in Japan just set a new fiber optical data transmission record with a technique that's compatible with existing cable infrastructure.
Researchers from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology successfully sent data down a custom multi-core fiber optical cable at a speed of 1.02 petabits per second. It is enough capacity for over 10 million channels of 8K broadcasting per second. That is 100,000 times faster than the promised next generation of high-speed gigabit connections.
In December of 2020, NICT made the first successful 1 petabit per second transmission of data over a standard diameter fiber optical cable, and while a speed improvement to 1.02 petabit per second just a year and a half later is certainly an impressive achievement, what makes it different?
In 2020, the NICT researchers used a multi-mode technique to send the data down a fiber-optic cable. The multi-mode technique requires the development and deployment of new integrated circuits across an entire network and expensive upgrades to make it work.
The researchers did away with the mixed-signal, multi-mode approach and instead reduced the transmission to just four "modes" each sent down one of the four cores. Imagine a plastic straw with four thinner straws stuffed inside each carrying a different flavor of soda, it's a gross simplification of what the researchers created The multi-core cable was only one of many innovations that made this record-setting data transfer possible.
In this experiment, by broadening the Raman amplification bandwidth to the full S-band and using customized thulium-doped fiber amplifiers (TDFAs) for S-band and extended L-band erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), we were able to use a record 20 THz optical spectrum with total of 801 x 25 GHz spaced wavelength channels, each with dual-polarization-256 QAM modulation for high spectral density in all wavelength bands.
This second breakthrough is dependent on hardware and techniques that are compatible with conventional hardware that is already in place across the country. Since the researchers limited the size of their multi-core cable to standard dimensions, it would be compatible with existing infrastructure, which would reduce upgrade costs. As 5G becomes more widespread, and with 6G just around the corner, the country's demand for data is going to continue to increase, but an innovation like this will give internet providers a sizeable head start for at least a few years.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
