Bell Labs Advances 100 Gbps Ethernet-Over-Optical

Bell Labs, the RD division of Lucent Technologies, announced the first transmission of 10 channels of 107 Gbps) data over 2,000 kilometers of fiber -- a significant enough distance to prove the technology's viability for the majority of networks where 100G Ethernet is a sought-after technology.

The results are being presented in a paper being delivered to the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Cannes this week.

In this same paper Bell Labs researchers also announced the successful transmission and reception of electronically multiplexed and demultiplexed 107 Gbps traffic using hardware similar to that used in today's 40 Gbps networks. By employing differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) at 107 Gbps, the high-speed electronics and opto-electronics used were required to have a mere 25% speed-up compared to those used in today's 40 Gbps systems.

A prototype of the fully integrated Lithium Niobate DQPSK modulator was provided by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan) and Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Inc.

Bell Labs said the use of technology similar to commercially available products is a significant step towards realizing the viability of manufacturing and installing 100 Gbps based networks at a reasonable cost per transmitted information bit.

"Our breakthroughs in both transmission distance and the use of commercially-viable components prove that 100 Gb/s serial is a viable technology for transmitting data traffic in its native Ethernet format," said Martin Zirngibl, director, Bell Labs.
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