Deutsche Telekom transmits 512Gbps over a single fibre channel

Time is of the essence. And when it comes to broadband, what everyone is clamouring for is the fastest download speeds with the least amount of downtime. After all, broadband now plays an important role not only for communications, but also for businesses and enterprises.

A lot of firms are consistently conducting research to figure out how to increase broadband speeds and improve the current technology. One of these is Deutsche Telekom, which recently announced that its research wing was able to transmit 512Gbps over a single fibre optical wavelength.

Deutsche Telekom stated: “While the bar is higher for fibre-optic transmission in a laboratory setting, this record was set under real-world conditions in the Telekom optical network on a route of 734km from Berlin to Hanover and back by speed of light.”

The current maximum bit rate is 100Gbps for channels that are operating in backbone networks. T-Labs, which is working with Alcatel-Lucent on the research program, stated that the bit rate that is usable for the new technology would increase to 400Gbps per channel.

A Deutsche Telekom said: “We have a need for more bandwidth in our network. Rapidly growing demand forces us to find solutions for the next step.”

The T-Labs project resulted in the development of the new record, which is called ‘Optically Supported IP Router Interfaces’ or OSIRIS, for short. With this technology, researchers were able to demonstrate speeds of 512Gbps over a 100GHz-wide channel.

Deutsche Telekom added: “This tremendous transmission performance was reached using innovative transmission technology with two carrier frequencies, two polarisation planes, 16-QAM quadrature amplitude modulation and digital offline signal processing for the equalisation of fibre influences with soft-FEC forward error correction decoding in the receiver.”