UCL Scientists Push 1.125Tbps Through a Single Coherent Optical Receiver 25
Mark.JUK writes: A team of researchers working in the Optical Networks Group at the University College London in England claim to have achieved the "greatest information rate ever recorded using a single [coherent optical] receiver", which was able to handle a record data speed of 1.125 Terabits per second (Tbps). The result, which required a 15 sub-carrier 8GBd DP-256QAM super-channel (15 channels of data) and total bandwidth of 121.5GHz, represents an increase of 12.5% relative to the previous record (1Tbps). Now they just need to test it using some long fibre optic cable because optical signals tend to become distorted when they travel over thousands of kilometers.
Big deal (Score:3)
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I was able to do that in Linux with a few shell and Perl scripts.
Ah, the speed and sophistication of interpreted languages.
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Do you know how hard it is to get a tablespoon of light to stay in place. It just wants to go everywhere.
Terabit ethernet (Score:1)
Could this be used for terabit ethernet? Many companies including Facebook and Google have indicated the need for terabit ethernet in their data centers. I'm surprised there isn't much effort to develop terabit ethernet. It sure seems like this would be useful for it, though.
Re:Terabit ethernet (Score:4, Informative)
This is aimed at optical transport. The framing will be OTN and it can carry many payload channels of 10GBE, 100GBE, or Sonet, SDH, whatever is needed. Ethernet sucks for long distance transport because it doesn't have built in layer one performance monitoring to match OTN and even old school Sonet/SDH.
Right now you can buy a single transceiver from Infinera that will do 500gbps using 10 carrier wavelengths. Ciena, Nokia and some others offer 200gbps over short distances on a single carrier. So, 1.125 gbps over 15 carriers isn't a huge leap forward, but is going to be table stakes for the next generation of optical transport.
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You don't have to regenerate the signal, just amplify it. Optical amplifiers have been around for decades and with current technology you can go thousands of kilometers without an OEO (optical-electrical-optical) regeneration just by placing amps every 100km or so. Chromatic dispersion is irrelevant these days because the Coherent optics have ridiculous CD tolerance.
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Up to the late 90's @ a regen shelter you needed to WDMdemux-Regen-OPAmp-WDMmux. Late 90's Nortel came out with MOR (Multiple Wavelength Optical Repeater) cards. Which replaced the WDMs and wavelength specific transmit regen cards but still used OPAmps. The OPAmps of the day had a theoretical range of 90 miles (at least Pirelli and Siemens did). Depending on the condition and quality of the OSP fiber you also need DSMs (Dispersion Compensation Modules). Latter Siemens and Ciena systems today do Regen and Am
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You're 3 decades out of date. You can amplify dozens of times and cover thousands of kilometers these days. Dallas to Chicago is a breeze. You can even optically express certain channels and drop others, and redirect them down different fiber paths dynamically based on impairments. Read up on hybrid EDFA/Raman amplifiers and flex-grid ROADM.
Bah, I was doing that last year (Score:1)
I 3D printed the whole thing. Onlty Luddites wait for others!
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And Windows still take 30 seconds to display the contents of a folder.
What about the incoherent optical receiver? (Score:2)
So, what kind of speed do they get with the incoherent optical receivers? 1 kb/sec?
Oh, so it talks? (Score:2)
This is coherent light.
UCL has an Electronics school? (Score:2)
I love London, but it surprises me that anyone would come here to study Electronics. Why would you when, on graduation from a course much more difficult than all the people churning through law and finance, you can look forward to never earning more than a tube driver, and watching the continuing decline of British industry and your future employment prospects, all from the comfort of your overpriced hovel in Surrey.
If you come here you go jump on whatever fancy bandwagon is the latest trend (seems to be Ja
impressive, but... (Score:3)
1.125 Tb/s over 121.5 GHz bandwidth? (Score:2)