BT and Huawei demonstrated speeds of 2 Tbps over a live core network spanning 700km between London and Dublin.
Separately, BT also announced today that it has successfully transmitted speeds of 5.6Tbps over a single optical fibre running on its trial network between the BT Labs in Adastral Park and the BT Tower in London, beating the previous record of 3 Tbps set in 2014.
Key technical facts about the trials:
- The 2Tbps trials exploit commercial flexible grid hardware and real-time flexible rate 64GBaud transponders. 64GBaud optical technology runs at twice the electrical speed of current deployed core optical network optical signals and is one of the key enablers for high-speed, long reach optical transmission.
- The live trials were conducted over a 727km commercial flexible grid optical core link between London and Dublin, based on Huawei’s OSN 9800/8800 and iManager U2000 platforms, carrying live 40/100G customer traffic. The link includes a 133km long unrepeatered submarine cable link from Dublin to Holyhead.
- The trials demonstrate, for the first time, the successful operation of real-time 64GBaud flexible-rate transponders allowing all-optical, long reach (unregenerated) superchannel transmission, with low latency.
- In addition, by exploiting flexible rate transponders, BT successfully demonstrated fast capacity turn up (or network upgrade) equivalent to ~2Tbps in one minute.
- BT and Huawei also successfully demonstrated a record real-time 5.6Tbps optical superchannel over a closed loop network running between the BT Tower and Adastral Park. This comprised 28 x 200Gb/s (64GBaud/QPSK) sub-channels, bundled together to provide combined capacity, achieving highest capacity and spectral efficiency.
Howard Watson, CEO of BT Technology, Service & Operations, said: “BT scientists built the first commercial single mode optical fibre link back in 1984 and the BT Labs remain at the forefront of photonics research more than thirty years later. The core network is the superhighway of the internet. It’s important that our core networks keep pace with the growth in bandwidth demands driven by take-up of high-speed fibre broadband, HD content, 4G smartphones and tablets and in the future, 5G services. So we’re investing in our core, as well as in high-speed access technology such as fibre broadband, to make sure there is no capacity crunch and deliver the best possible speeds to customers.