NTT, KDDI Research, Sumitomo Electric, Fujikura, Furukawa, NEC, and CIT have demonstrated the world's largest transmission capacity of 118.5 Tera-bit/s using four cores of optical fiber that is arranged within a 125 µm glass diameter of a single fiber.
According to NEC, the concept of 4-5 cores in a single fiber can maintain the same transmission quality with the current optical fiber.
This achievement proves the concept of multi-core fiber based long-haul and large capacity transmission system consisting of multiple vendor technologies, and it makes significant progress on practical use of the multi-core fiber technology. The 316 km long multi-core transmission line is realized with a 0.21 dB/km average loss concatenating the standard diameter multi-core fibers fabricated by multiple vendors.
According to NEC, the multi-core fiber having multiple optical paths (cores) in a single fiber has been studied intensively all over the world in order to overcome the future capacity crunch and to realize the high density or space saving optical facilities. However, these high core count multi-core fiber usually needs a thicker glass diameter, and it requires an extreme advance in the fabrication process and further development on sub-components, said NEC.
The companies aim to introduce the standard diameter multi-core fiber by the early 2020s.
