Science Alert June 4, 2022
Researchers in Japan achieved new data transmission speed record using an optical fiber network similar to those currently used for internet infrastructure. In their experiment they used 0.125 mm diameter multi-core fiber (MCF), with WDM, total of 801 parallel wavelength channels were packed into the same line. They used four cores instead of the standard one, essentially quadrupling the routes for data to take, all while keeping the cable the same size as a standard optical fiber line. They applied various other optimization, signal boosting, and decoding technologies. The team plans to continue to improve both transmission speed and transmission distance in their future research.
Although they used more complicated technology that required extra work to encode and decode the signals than in their previous work, according to the researchers this system is easier to implement in actual physical networks and more like the infrastructure that already exists. The research was presented in May at the International Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2022…read more.
A table comparing data transmission experiments. (NICT). Credit: National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan