Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs breaks 100 petabit per second km barrier in lab tests

New Delhi: Alcatel-Lucent today said that scientists at its research arm, Bell Labs, have set a new optical transmission record of more than 100 petabits per second.kilometer (equivalent to 100 million gigabits per second.kilometer).

This transmission experiment involved sending the equivalent of 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago.

This is the highest capacity ever achieved over a transoceanic distance and represents an increase that exceeds that of today's most advanced commercial undersea cables by a factor of ten. To achieve these record-breaking results the Bell Labs researchers made innovative use of new detection techniques and harnessed a diverse array of technologies in modulation, transmission, and signal processing

High speed optical transmission is a key component of Alcatel-Lucent's High Leverage Network architecture, key elements of which have already been selected by leading service providers.

To achieve these record-breaking results researchers from the Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100 gigabits of data per second, to dramatically enhance the performance of standard wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology.

''There is no question that this record breaking transmission is a milestone in achieving the network capacity and speeds and a key step forward in satisfying the ongoing explosion in demand,'' said Gee Rittenhouse, head of Bell Labs Research. ''This is a prime example of Bell Labs preeminent research and demonstrates the ability of our researchers to solve complex problems,'' he explained.