Alcatel-Lucent Trials 1.4 Tbps over Existing Fiber

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) and BT announced trial speeds of up to 1.4 Tbps with a spectral efficiency of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz (b/s/Hz) on an existing core fiber connection. The companies believe the trial to be the fastest speed ever achieved in commercial grade hardware in a real-world environment.

The field trial, conducted over an existing fiber link between the BT Tower in London and BT's Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk, used a new "flexible grid" infrastructure (Flexgrid) to vary the gaps between transmission channels, usually set at 50 GHz.