Novel 19-Core Fibre Hits 1.7 Petabits Per Second
Researchers from Japan and Australia developed a multicore optical fiber capable of transmitting a record-breaking 1,7 petabits/second, while remaining compatible with existing fiber infrastructure. The team, from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Sumitomo Electric Industries and Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, achieved the feat by using a fiber that had 19 cores. This is the most cores ever packed into a cable of a standard diameter of 0.125 millimeters.
\”We believe that 19 cores are the maximum practical number of spatial channels or cores you can have on a standard cladding diameter fibre and still maintain high quality transmission,\” said Georg Rademacher. Rademacher previously led the project at NICT, but recently returned to Germany where he took up a position as director of optical communications at University of Stuttgart.
SMF is the most common fiber cable used for long distance transmission. SMF has reached its limit in terms of practicality as the network traffic is rapidly increasing due to AI, cloud computing and IoT. Researchers are interested in the use of multicore fibers in conjunction with SDM, a transmission method that uses multiple spatial channels within a cable.
Source:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/multicore-fiber