TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity company and provider of subsea communications technology, announced that it has demonstrated what it claims is a new record transmission capacity of 70.4 Tbit/s over a distance of 7,600 km.
The record transmission utilised SubCom’s newly available C+L technology, which features amplifiers delivering nearly 10 THz of usable optical bandwidth, a transmission line designed to minimise noise accumulation and enhance performance, a new transmission format based on multi-dimensional coded modulation with hybrid probabilistic and geometrical constellation shaping, and digital signal processing providing mulitple stages of non-linear compensation.
SubCom announced earlier this year that it would deploy C+L technology in an undersea cable that it had started manufacturing in late 2016. SubCom’s C+L is designed to effectively double the available transmission bandwidth of the repeater compared to the same number of fibre pairs utilising traditional C-band technology. As half the number of fibre pairs are needed compared to a C-band repeater, the C+L technology can enable higher performance and more cost effective submarine systems.
TE SubCom announced in January that it had begun manufacturing of C+L optical transmission technology, designed to provide cable system operators with ultra-wide, low-latency transmission performance and effectively doubling available bandwidth and capacity per fibre pair.
The C+L technology leverages a second length of erbium-doped fibre in undersea repeaters that provides both amplification and support for wavelengths on the long wavelength side of the traditional C-band for telecommunications applications. TE SubCom stated at that time that it was manufacturing cable with the new technology for a contracted system scheduled to launch in 2018. The company noted that a trans-Atlantic cable with eight fibre pairs equipped with C+L technology would be able to deliver capacity of up to 325 Tbit/s.
The results of the TE SubCom transmission technology demonstration were announced at the recent OFC conference in Los Angeles.
http://www.te.com/usa-en/industries/subsea-communications.html
