Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs say they have set the world record for the highest single carrier bit rate at 1.52 Terabits per second (Tbit/s) over 80 km of standard single mode fiber, which is four times the market’s current state-of-the-art of approximately 400 Gigabits per second.

That speed is the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 1.5 million YouTube videos.

The achievement was presented as part of Nokia Bell Labs’ post deadline research papers at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference & Exhibition (OFC) being held this week in San Diego.

The highest single-carrier bitrate at 1.52 Terabits per second was set by a Nokia Bell Labs optical research team led by Fred Buchali. This record was established by employing a new 128 Gigasample/second converter enabling the generation of signals at 128 Gbaud symbol rate and information rates of the individual symbols beyond 6.0 bits/symbol/polarization. This accomplishment breaks the team’s own record of 1.3 Tbit/s set in September 2019 while supporting Nokia’s record-breaking field trial with Etisalat.

Nokia Bell Labs researcher Di Che and team also set a new data-rate world record for directly modulated lasers (DML), which are crucially important for low-cost, high-speed applications such as datacenter connections. The DML team achieved a world record data rate beyond 400 Gbit/s for links up to 15 km.

In addition to these world records, Nokia Bell Labs researchers have also recently achieved significant achievements in optical communications, including:

• The first field trial using spatial-division-multiplexed (SDM) cable over a 2,000km span of 4-core coupled-core fiber was achieved by researchers Roland Ryf and the SDM team. The experiments clearly show that coupled-core fibers are technically viable, offer high transmission performance, while maintaining an industry standard 125-um cladding diameter.
  
• A research team led by Rene-Jean Essiambre, Roland Ryf and Murali Kodialam introduced a novel new set of modulation formats that provide improved linear and nonlinear transmission performance at submarine distances of 10,000 km. The proposed transmission formats are generated by a neuronal network and can significantly outperform traditional formats (QPSK) used in today’s submarine systems.
• Researcher Junho Cho and team experimentally demonstrated capacity gains of 23% for submarine cable systems that operate under electrical supply power constraints. The capacity gains were achieved by optimizing the gain shaping filters using neural networks.