Nokia Bell Labs reported in a post-deadline paper at OFC 2020 last week (yes, there were post-deadline papers delivered) that it has accomplished a single-carrier transmission of 1.52 Tbps over 80 km of standard single-mode fiber. The transmission is a world record, Nokia Bell Labs asserts, and was one of several innovations the organization described during last week’s event.
A Nokia Bell Labs optical research team led by Fred Buchali achieved the 1.52-Tbps transmission using a 128-Gsample/sec converter that enabled the generation of signals at a symbol rate of 128 Gbaud and information rates of the individual symbols beyond 6 bits/symbol/polarization. Nokia Bell Labs also held the previous record, 1.3 Tbps, set in September 2019 as part of a field trial with Etisalat (see “Nokia, Etisalat conduct single-carrier terabit optical transmission field trial”).