14 Tbps over a Single Optical Fiber

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) has successfully demonstrated the ultra-large capacity optical transmission of 14 Tera bits per second (Tera is one trillion) over a single 160 km long optical fiber. The value of 14 Tbps (111 Gbps x 140 ch) exceeds the current record of about 10 Tbps and so claims the record of the world’s largest transmission capacity. The present core optical network is an optical transport network with about 1 Tbps capacity. Based on the wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) of signals with the channel capacity of 10 Gbps, it uses optical amplifiers with the bandwidth of about 4THz. The data traffic has been doubling every year due to the rapid spread of broadband access.