Chinese Team Achieves 3.2 Petabits Throughput On A Single Optical Strand
A Chinese team achieved this new world record of 3.2 petabits per second on a single fibre strand using the C, L, and S bands combined with 24 optical cores. So they tripled the usable spectrum on each of the 24 optical highways to get aggregate throughput of 3.2 Tbps. Each core achieved 133 Tbps. It is increasingly common for terrestrial networks to use both C and L bands. For example, Arelion has used the C and L bands because their network routes only consists of one or two fiber pairs. I call it a low fibre count, DWDM-on-steroids approach. The C band is defined as 1530 to 1565 nanometer wavelengths whereas the L band ranges from 1565 to 1625. L band attenuation in standard fiber is only slightly higher than the work horse C band. So L is the natural place to start when expanding the spectrum range to gain more bandwidth. In contrast, the S band has significantly higher attenuation than either C and L band, and consequently, has not been implemented in commercial hardware. S band ...