NTT claims world record for optical fibre transmission
Tech firm reveals results of what is said to be world’s first long-distance space division multiplexing transmission experiment
In what it claims is a world first, and continuing the advances in optical technology that it has made throughout 2024, NTT has revealed it has demonstrated a stable spatial multiplexing signal transmission at a maximum rate of 455Tbps under even unstable real-world conditions and offering a capacity of more than 50x that of conventional systems.
At the heart of the breakthrough is the use of large-scale multi-input multi-output (MIMO) signal processing technology – usually deployed in the wireless comms – which is said to be able to tolerate maintenance work in the installation environment and disturbances such as high winds and rain. In the project, NTT researchers constructed a cable of 12-coupled-core fibre while significantly reducing propagation delay dispersion, and installed it in a tunnel or aerial section emulating a terrestrial field environment.
In the optical transmission field, MIMO technology can be expected to improve transmission capacity by using polarisation and spatial modes in optical fibres. The 12-coupled-core multicore fibres have the same diameter as existing optical fibres suitable for mass production to commercial high-density multicore cables.
As well as offering a breakthrough, the new fibres advance a key component of NNT’s Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) initiative, which has the core mission of “turning science fiction into science fact”, showing how speed-of-light technologies will improve daily life, work and society at large. The overarching emphasis is to address a world that is moving quickly to optics, a world that is moving to replacing “electrons with protons”.
From a technological basis, IOWN comprises three major technical fields: an all-photonics network (APN), digital twin computing and a cognitive foundation.
The networks and information processing infrastructure including terminals are intended to provide high-speed, high-capacity communication using technology focused on optics, as well as large computational resources.
The APN is targeting three key performance indicators: 100x power consumption efficiency, 125x transmission capacity, and 1/200 end-to-end delay reduction. NTT said reaching these performance levels would be vital as businesses face an exponentiating growth in data usage, spurred by the proliferation of high-capacity mobile networks and artificial intelligence technologies.
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In a field environment where the signal propagation environment in optical fibre cables fluctuates due to external disturbances, NTT said it had succeeded for the first time in the world a stable transmission experiment with the record field capacity of more than 50 times that of the current benchmark.
The experiment was said to have demonstrated a transmission of 455Tbps over a transmission distance of 53.5km by applying large-scale MIMO signal processing technology in a terrestrial field environment. NTT added that it had also succeeded in amplified transmission at a high capacity of 389 terabits per second over a transmission distance of 1,017 km, which can cover the distance between Tokyo and Osaka, the main artery of Japan’s optical backbone network.
Going forward, NTT expects the fibre apparatus to be a fundamental technology for realising future terrestrial optical transmission systems in terrestrial field environments using coupled-core multicore fibres with more than 10 cores in the future.
It added that by further advancing research and development of the technology in collaboration with related technology fields, it aims to realise high-capacity terrestrial networks that will contribute to the realisation of infrastructure for the IOWN concept and the coming 5G/6G era in the 2030s.
