BT and Alcatel-Lucent Record Real-World Fibre Optic Speed of 1.4Tbps In the UK

Mark.JUK writes "The United Kingdom's national telecoms operator, BT, has successfully teamed up with Alcatel-Lucent to conduct a field trial that delivered real-world data speeds of 1.4 Terabits per second over an existing commercial-grade 410km fiber optic link. The trial used a 'record spectral efficiency' of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz and Flexgrid technology to vary the gaps between transmission channels for 42.5% greater data transmission efficiency than today's standard networks. The speed was achieved by overlaying an 'Alien Super Channel' (i.e. it operates transparently on top of BT's existing optical network), which bundled together 7 x 200Gbps (Gigabits per second) channels and then reduced the 'spectral spacing' between the channels from 50GHz to 35GHz using the 400Gb/s Photonic Services Engine (PSE) technology on the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). It's hoped that this could help boost capacity to those who need it without needing to lay expensive new fiber cables."

Re:

[Kjella]

Yeah, except it takes a blazingly fast line and makes it even faster. At this level of aggregation no single customer is going to notice much, you rarely hear people who have a big last mile pipe complain about the backbone speed. Nice to see the backbone keeping up with FTTH and such, but really the main issue is that fiber is still for the few. Or to turn on gloat mode, I'm not sure what's behind my 100Mbps pipe but it seems pretty damn fast to me.

Re:

[timeOday]

you rarely hear people who have a big last mile pipe complain about the backbone speed.

Let's say it's Sunday evening and Netflix is getting choppy. How would you even know if the problem is the last mile or backbone?

Re:

[Bengie]

Trace route or pathping?

Re:

[timeOday]

I don't think they're effective for that purpose, at least not any more. The actual structure of a network within each ASN is obscured (for network security and business propriety). And latency may well depend on the content of an individual packet, where it's to/from, whether it's part of a stream, etc due to traffic shaping.

Re:

[Bengie]

Most ISP don't actually shape Netflix, they use DNS to send you to a different server to alter your route. Shaping can happen, but you find it more in ISPs that have 1mb DSL, not 100mb cable. It gets really hard to shape large numbers of people with fast connections. If they are shaping, not much you can do. My ISP does not shape or QoS, so tracert and pathping work fine.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I had this problem for about a year with Virgin Media. Turned out to be their Content Delivery Network, i.e. the caching servers inside their network. Blocking them at the router level fixed the problem.

Re:

[petermgreen]

I hear plenty of people complaining that their real world throughput at peak times is much lower than their sync speed. That means that either the servers or some part of the network between the user and the server is overloaded.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Pffft... 100Mbps? My PHONE gets 150Mbps in both directions. Home broadband is 1000Mbps over fibre.

My ex had 100Mbps fibre back in 2003, for about 23 quid a month. It was more common back then than it is in the UK now. We are over a decade behind thanks to BT.

http://i.imgur.com/9dZfFQk.jpg [imgur.com]

Re:

[amorsen]

Yes, modern fiber is becoming very DSL-like, with many sub-carriers and advanced encodings for each carrier. Unfortunately the power requirements are fairly high.

Re:DSL..

[plover]

The difference is that DSL is running data over old Cat 3 voice grade lines, and there is a clear technological benefit to moving to an alternative media for distribution. The reason is noise: Cat 3 was never designed to reject it. Coax, Cat 5, and other wire types were specifically engineered to help reject noise at different frequencies. And the better the category of wire, the better the throughput.

Fiber doesn't generally have that same kind of problems (unless you foolishly installed cheap plastic optical fibers.) There isn't a special "greased lightning fiber" people can turn to that carries more data. Instead, advances in lasers, optics, and encoding technologies are used to increase throughput by replacing the transmitters and receivers.

In general, if you need more throughput in a fiber environment than commercially available transmitters can produce, your only choice is to pull more fibers. Whereas in DSL-land if you need more throughput, the rational choice is to abandon the technology completely and move to a different media.

Re:DSL..

[necro81]

Fiber doesn't generally have that same kind of problems (unless you foolishly installed cheap plastic optical fibers.) There isn't a special "greased lightning fiber" people can turn to that carries more data.

Speak for yourself - I just picked up a $5000 S/PDIF cable from Monster Cable that moves those bits so much faster than any other cable on the market. When you hear the results, you can just tell that the 1's and 0's have so much more definition and crispness than ordinary commodity cables.

Re:

[Bengie]

Monster cables, making sure the super-position of your photons are kept pristine.

Re:DSL..

[plover]

Fiber doesn't generally have that same kind of problems (unless you foolishly installed cheap plastic optical fibers.) There isn't a special "greased lightning fiber" people can turn to that carries more data.

Speak for yourself - I just picked up a $5000 S/PDIF cable from Monster Cable that moves those bits so much faster than any other cable on the market. When you hear the results, you can just tell that the 1's and 0's have so much more definition and crispness than ordinary commodity cables.

I hate to disappoint you, Skippy, but that's just regular optical fiber that's been SpeedWaxed. You still need to buy a tube of Denon Optical Fiber SpeedWax and coat the fibers monthly. Otherwise, the ones tend to get a bit fat, and the zeros get a little skinny. Without it, the highs will have a pronounced distortion on the even harmonics, and the phrenological ephemera will subluxate the transception. Oh, and don't forget to get their Shielded optical cable, specifically designed to reject RF interference. Get the one with gold plated connectors to ensure rich bass.

Re:

[plover]

Lest you think I was kidding about shielded fiber cable with gold plated connectors: http://www.amazon.com/Cable-Ma... [amazon.com]

But it's only $8.99, so it's kind of difficult to mock it mercilessly.

Re:

[gregski]

Although noise rejection isn't normally an issue, different fibres do have different bandwidths:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]

and then there's the hollow fibre mentioned in the article, which achieved 73.7 Tb/s!

Re:

[InvalidError]

There are multiple different types of optical fibers out there and not all of them are suitable for DWDM, polarization and various other schemes... so "greased lightning" fiber does exist if you compare fiber from ~30 years ago with state-of-the-art specialty fiber.

As for fiber not having the same problems as DSL, most of the electromagnetic stuff that applies to DSL also applies to fiber; just on such drastically different scales that they become negligible in most cases.

Re:

[plover]

That's why I qualified my comment with "generally". Figures I'd get caught :-)

please report in standard units

[Trepidity]

That's about 875 micro-library-of-congresses per second, assuming 600 dpi [loc.gov] LOC digitization. Getting close to breaking the coveted milli-LOC/s barrier!

Re:

[Ashenkase]

Ya, but how many football fields is that?

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[Kjella]

Everyone who uses standard units knows it's just over 1 kLOC/fortnight, don't go all SI on us.

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[timeOday]

Let's see, the summary contains: 1) the bit rate 2) the link length 3) the bit rate per Hz and 4) the percentage improvement over what they were using before.

What is it you're complaining about, exactly? Or is this just a pavlovian response to any story about bandwidth?

Re:

[fisted]

While the summary contains all that, GP's comment additionally contains the "joke", while your comment contains some "miss", qualifying it "whoosh".

Re:

[abies]

Quotation needed.
BTW, most people are on GPRS/3G/whatever - but you probably meant 'landline' type of connectivity. I really doubt that there are more people using dialup compared to low-speed DSL (1-2Mb range).

Eugene

[bugs2squash]

Did Gene Roddenberry get the naming rights to all of the equipment ?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[ketomax]

Do not worry my friend. Lots of other joint experiments are going on by companies to take it beyond the ever-elusive GB barrier.

Re:

[Philip Mather]

No, no, no this is BRITISH Telecom. One of their engineers will draw up perfectly feasible and realisable plans for an even better version, management however won't be interested and so the plans will be left in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'. In the meantime some foreign competitor will eventually come to the same level fives years later and proceed to patent it six ways from Sunday and make £500 bazzilion from

Re:

[ionix5891]

Or worse block a big pile of the internet as they do in UK, you know to protect the children (you wouldn't want them pirating Myley Cirus...)

Re:

[Andrewkov]

What the article doesn't mention: 1.4 tbs down, 10mbs up

Re:

[fisted]

good lord, are you serious?!

Re:

[RivenAleem]

What's a datacap?

What is the cost

[vikingpower]

, in LOCRiDS ( Library Of Congress Replacement Cost in DollarS ) , of one of those to my doorstep ?

All the better to spy on you with...

[bulled]

The GHCQ and NSA thank you for filling their files faster.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you learn math? Fox news?

Re:

[fisted]

while the end result is correct, this doesn't seem right:

(bit)/(s)/(Hz) = (bit)/(Hz)/(s)

Re:

[LeadSongDog]

You've forgotten that the Hz represents cycles/s, not just 1/s. Hence their so-called "spectral efficiency" is 5.7 bits/cycle. The problem of course is that the article does not address the SNR nor the BER that it took them to get that 5.7 result. If you need cryo-tech photodetectors and massive FEC to get that result, it's less impressive than doing it with the existing kit and minor data redundancy.

Re:

[fisted]

No, [Hz] = [1/s]. Or put differently, the 'cycles' you mention is unity

To him who hath...

[axlash]

If only they could have such speeds over wireless connections...

I can't see people who live in areas that are hard for cable to reach benefitting much from this.

Re:

[Bengie]

That 2% of the population? Who cares? They know what they're giving up living in the middle of a 1000 acre forest. for the rest of a nation, even farmers, this is not an issue.

Shame no-one in the UK will be able to benefit

[simplypeachy]

Once the government has finished fucking up [thinkbroadband.com] our Internet access completely.

Storage capacity

[StripedCow]

real-world data speeds of 1.4 Terabits per second over an existing commercial-grade 410km fiber optic link.

Meaning the link can store only 1.4 Tb/s * 410km / c = 239 MB. (Where c is the speed of light in the fiber link).

Bah, that's nothing.

Re:

[Bengie]

There is a 16tb/s connection that has a 680km range available right now and a 1tb/s link that was tested to have a 13,000km range and should be ready for real world soon. Those two have slightly better storage capacity. There is also the 1pb/s connect with 56km range, but that uses a special new type of fiber that is much more expensive and both will take a while to see real-world use.

Re:

[ballpoint]

There may be applications for that kind of storage with a unique capacity/throughput/latency combination.

Re:

[isorox]

I would be happy if BT could give me the off peak speed I can get during the night of 73Mb/s during peak times where it drops to 8 - 10 Mb/s.

Well as your copper from your house to the cabinet can do 73mbit, increasing bandwidth on the second-to-last mile from cabinet to linx is the only solution.

Fortunately thats exactly what this technology promises.

Maxmimum bandwidth

[manu0601]

Wikipedia says the record on an optic fiber is 101 Tbps [wikipedia.org]. How is this better?

Re:

[sjames]

It was done on an existing commercial grade fiber. No need to lay new fiber.