Japanese tech titans NTT and NEC believe they have proven the performance of a new fiber optic technology that can increase the capacity of submarine cables by a factor of 12.
Open Optical Transport [NEC Official]
The two will outline their efforts at next week's Optical Fiber Communications Conference — the world's preeminent forum on the subject. On Thursday, they teased their presentation with an announcement of tests using a linked 12-core multi-core fiber over a 7,280km stretch.
As the partners explained, current submarine cables use "single-core fiber, which has a single optical transmission path called a core within a single fiber."
But optical network boffins work on multi-core fibers that add more paths, without increasing the diameter of 0.125 millimeters for each strand. NTT and NEC worked with fibers that packed a dozen cores into that small space.
