NEC and Corning claim they have achieved record-breaking results in transmission capacity over optical fibers. Researchers from the NEC Labs in Princeton, NJ, and from Corning’s Sullivan Park Research Center in Corning, NY, demonstrated ultra-high speed transmission with a capacity of 1.05 Petabit/s (1015 bits per second) over multi-core fiber (MCF) that contains 12 single-mode and two few-mode cores by employing the advanced space division multiplexing (SDM) scheme and optical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal processing technique.

The fiber designed by Corning researchers has cores arranged in a triangular lattice, which enables transmission over a large number of spatial modes. By combining spectral multiplexing with polarization and spatial mode multiplexing and employing multilevel modulation formats, NEC researchers achieved the total spectral efficiency of 109 bits/sec/Hz, while the aggregate transmission capacity was 1.050 Petabit/s, which is the highest capacity over a single optical fiber reported so far.

The result was reported at the 2012 Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science XXVIII (FiO/LS) meeting.