Researchers have set a new speed record for industry-standard optical fiber, reaching 1.7 Petabit over 67 km of fiber. The fiber, which contains 19 cores each capable of carrying a signal, meets global fiber size standards, ensuring it can be adopted without massive infrastructure changes.
19 core optical fiber. Image credit: Rademacher et al., doi: 10.1364/OFC.2023.Th4A.4.
All of the world’s Internet traffic is carried through optical fibers, each 125 microns thick.
These industry-standard fibers connect continents, data centers, cell phone towers, satellite ground stations, and our homes and businesses.
Back in 1988, the first undersea fiber optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean carried 20 Megabits or 40,000 phone calls over two pairs of fibers. Known as TAT 8, it came at the right time to support the development of the World Wide Web. But it soon reached its peak.
The latest generation of submarine cables, such as the Grace Hopper cable, due to be commissioned in 2022, carries 22 terabits in each of 16 fiber pairs. That’s a million times the power of TAT 8.
But that’s still not enough to meet the demand for streaming TV, video conferencing and all of our global communications.
“Decades of optics research around the world have allowed industry to push more and more data through single fibres,” said Macquarie University researcher Simon Gross.
“They used different colors, different polarizations, coherence of light and many other tricks to manipulate light.”
Most current fibers have a single core that carries multiple light signals. But this current technology is practically limited to a few terabits per second due to interference between signals.
“We can increase the power by using thicker fibers,” Dr. Gross said.
“However, thicker fibers will be less flexible, more fragile, less suitable for long-haul cables, and will require massive reworking of the fiber infrastructure.”
“We could just add more fiber. But each fiber adds to the cost and expense of equipment, and we’re going to need a lot more fiber.”
To meet the exponentially growing demand for data movement, telcos need technologies that offer greater data throughput while reducing costs.
The newly developed fiber contains 19 cores, each of which can carry a signal.
“We created a compact glass chip with a waveguide etched into it with 3D laser printing technology,” said Dr. Gross.
“It allows signals to be delivered to 19 individual fiber cores simultaneously with uniformly low loss.”
“Other approaches are lossy and limited by the number of cores.”
The authors presented their results in 2023. in March Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2023 in San Diego, California, USA.
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Georg Rademacher et al. 2023. Randomly coupled 19-core multicore fiber with standard cladding diameter. OFC 2023, paper # Th4A.4; doi: 10.1364/OFC.2023.Th4A.4
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