New trials by BT and Huawei have achieved the fastest ever speeds of 2Tbps over a live core network link which spans more than 700km between London and Dublin. The trial which was conducted by BT’s team of researchers based at Adastral Park, Ipswich saw the use of commercial flexible grid hardware and real-time flexible rate 64GBaud transponders.
In 2014, BT used the optical superchannel technology to deliver record breaking speeds over a closed trial network. Now, the company has successfully applied the same technology to the commercial fibre link carrying live customer traffic between the two cities.
Separately, BT also announced 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 3Tbps set in 2014. This speed is the equivalent of downloading almost 200 HD quality films in one second.
The technology and techniques pioneered in the company’s labs - using Terabit superchannels and flexible grid infrastructures – will allow BT to avoid a ‘capacity crunch’, by squeezing far more bandwidth out of its existing core optical networks which are the “motorways” of the internet. This can be achieved by increasing the spectral efficiency of a single strand of glass, said BT.
Howard Watson, CEO of BT Technology, Service & Operations
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.
Zha Jun, President of Huawei Fixed Network Product Line
Ultra-High-Speed optical networks are an indispensable infrastructure for the future of digital life, and this is an area where Huawei is investing, to help telcos such as BT squeeze as much capacity out of their core networks as possible.
