The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan announced recently that researchers from NICT, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the University of L'Aquila in Italy achieved a breakthrough transmission of fiber optics, which can transmit up to 22.9 Pb/s of data through a single fiber optic cable composed of multiple fibers, breaking the previous world record of fiber optic transmission.
NICT released its results and compared them with previous ones
NICT announced that to cope with the increasing communication volume, researchers achieved this breakthrough by combining the latest research technology with space division multiplexing (SDM) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). SDM uses multiple multi-core fibers and various transmission technologies to handle more than 100 spatial channels and then combines them with multi-bandwidth WDM. Researchers combined this 38-core, three-mode fiber optic cable with a multi-band compatible MIMO receiver.
NICT released a schematic diagram of ultra-large capacity optical communication using this transmission system
NICT said that this is the first time that different multiplexing technologies have been combined to achieve a major breakthrough in data transmission technology. The research results have been submitted and accepted at the 49th European Conference on Optical Communication in Glasgow.
Although the technology is ready to be integrated into the existing global optical connection infrastructure, it still needs to upgrade the current telecommunications centers that use ultra-large capacity fiber optics. NICT said that once the technology is deployed, the data traffic that the new infrastructure can handle is expected to increase by three orders of magnitude (about 1000 times the transmission capacity of today's commercial optical communication systems).
Regarding NICT's announcement, some industry insiders analyzed that the transmission speed record of fiber optics has been constantly broken in recent years, and it is not yet possible to assert which method is the most feasible from a commercial point of view.
