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takyon writes:

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.

Original Submission