UCL Scientists Push 1.125Tbps Through a Single Coherent Optical Receiver

Mark.JUK writes: A team of researchers working in the Optical Networks Group at the University College London in England claim to have achieved the "greatest information rate ever recorded using a single [coherent optical] receiver", which was able to handle a record data speed of 1.125 Terabits per second (Tbps). The result, which required a 15 sub-carrier 8GBd DP-256QAM super-channel (15 channels of data) and total bandwidth of 121.5GHz, represents an increase of 12.5% relative to the previous record (1Tbps). Now they just need to test it using some long fibre optic cable because optical signals tend to become distorted when they travel over thousands of kilometers.

Comments

Re:Terabit ethernet

[Shatrat]

This is aimed at optical transport. The framing will be OTN and it can carry many payload channels of 10GBE, 100GBE, or Sonet, SDH, whatever is needed. Ethernet sucks for long distance transport because it doesn't have built in layer one performance monitoring to match OTN and even old school Sonet/SDH.
Right now you can buy a single transceiver from Infinera that will do 500gbps using 10 carrier wavelengths. Ciena, Nokia and some others offer 200gbps over short distances on a single carrier. So, 1.125 gbps over 15 carriers isn't a huge leap forward, but is going to be table stakes for the next generation of optical transport.