Fujitsu, NTT, and NEC test 24 Tbps on fiber

Fujitsu, NTT (NYSE: NTT) and NEC on Tuesday came together to form a new coalition that has set a goal of achieving 400G per channel over fiber in two years.

The trio said that they plan to combine 60 channels using the new technology to deliver data transmission rates of about 24 Tbps over one fiber. They will leverage current multiplexing and modulation techniques in addition to ways to address signal degradation over long distances.

For this project, the group will use a mix of dual-polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DP-QPSK), which is currently used for 100 Gbps transmission networks, and dual-polarization 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-16QAM).

In addition to speed, the group will address network adaptability and power consumption issues.

Sponsored by the Japanese government's "Research and Development Project for the Ultra-high Speed and Green Photonic Networks," a main driver of this initiative is network restoration in the wake of natural disasters.  

Japan is a prime area to test how rapid changes like an earthquake could affect a long-haul optical network. Likewise, they will focus on ways to reduce the amount of hardware required and modulate and demodulate traffic from a single device.

This is not the only project to examine higher speed fiber transmission. In September, NTT demonstrated the ability to transmit one petabit over a single 50 km fiber.

Besides this trio, a growing base of industry forum and standards groups, including the International Telecommunications Union and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) are also looking at building new specifications and standards for 400G-plus networks.

For more:
- Network World has this article
- see the release

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