Transmission Record: Equal to Sending 5,000 HDTV Movies per Second

By Karla Robinson
September 26, 2012

Data transmission just got a whole lot faster. The record for capacity on conventional optical fiber has been defeated 10 times over.
Four organizations teamed up to test a new technology that enables 1 petabit — 1,000 terabits or the equivalent of 5,000 HDTV two-hour long videos — to be transmitted each second over a 52.4 km length of 12-core optical fiber.
The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) along with Fujikura Ltd, Hokkaido University and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) demonstrated this new ultra-large capacity transmission.
The breakthrough could have a dramatic effect on broadband services, an area increasingly stressed by expanded smartphone traffic.
“Efforts to increase the capacity of optical networks to accommodate surging traffic demand have largely focused on driving down infrastructure costs by using more efficient optical communications equipment to support more widespread deployment of broadband services without changing the structure of optical fiber itself,” NTT’s press release states.
“With further cooperation and development of these technologies that exploit the freedom of optical fiber spatial structures, optical amplification, and spectrally-efficient transmission technologies, this will open the way to even longer distance transmission and very large capacity optical networks that support the continued rollout of broadband services in the years ahead,” suggests the release.

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