TE Subcom transmits 200 Gbps, 400 Gbps undersea

A day after Alcatel-Lucent announced a high-speed multi-rate optical transmission demonstration over terrestrial fiber (see “Telefonica Espana, Alcatel-Lucent test multi-rate optical transmission to 400 Gbps”), TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company, says it has done the same thing over an undersea fiber-optic network. The company says it successfully transmitted 200-Gbps and 400-Gbps signals over a single fiber pair.

The company reported the achievement in a post-deadline paper at OFC/NFOEC last month. In the presentation, TE Subcom said it demonstrated a total capacity of 21 Tbps over more than 10,000 km on the single fiber pair at a spectral efficiency of 6 bps/Hz.

First, TE Subcom engineers transmitted 106 channels at 200-Gbps each over 10,300 km with a channel spacing of 33 GHz. Next, they transmitted the same total capacity over 9200 km in 53 superchannels of 400-Gbps each. A single high-bandwidth receiver detected the superchannels.

“Transpacific length transmission at 6-bps/Hz spectral efficiency is a significant milestone for undersea communications,” said Seymour Shapiro, CTO, TE SubCom. “More impressive is that this was achieved using both 200-Gbps and 400-Gbps channels and large total capacity. Such 400-Gbps laboratory experiments typically require multiple coherent receivers, whereas our recent demonstration used a single high-bandwidth receiver.”

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