Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) researchers are demonstrating a dense optical fiber system:
The research arm of Japanese network operator NTT is getting ready to demonstrate a system that can put 12 cores in a single 125 micron fibre, according to this announcement at The Optical Society.
That would, in a hypothetical deployment, yield an impressive throughput: 144 cores, and current Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems, each could carry 100 wavelengths, each able to run 100 Gbps. That's 1.44 million Gbps – or 1.44 petabits per second. The bottlenecks are: getting light down each individual core without the signals suffering interference or degradation, and; signal processing.
The NTT multi-core fibre contains 12 cores in a square lattice, which the researchers say fitted best inside a standard-profile 125 micron fibre. They also tested a 19 core hexagonal arrangement (first demonstrated last year), and a 10 core circular layout. While last year's 19 core layout would yield higher throughput, [it] required 250 micron fibres.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:49PM
They say the application is undersea cables.
Can they do a fusion splice?
Do they have a multichannel optical amplifier that is at a similar scale?
Can they use it to offer dark fiber, or is cross talk canceling required at each end?