TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company and an industry pioneer in undersea communications technology, announced that its engineers have demonstrated record-breaking transpacific transmission using both 200Gb/s and 400Gb/s data channels.

The results, presented at the recent post deadline session of the 2013 OFC/NFOEC conference in Anaheim, CA, demonstrated a total capacity on a single fiber pair of 21Tb/s transmitted over more than 10,000km at a spectral efficiency of 6b/s/Hz. This achievement was enabled by careful engineering of the transmitted signals, in order to achieve both long-distance performance and high spectral utilization.

“Transpacific length transmission at 6b/s/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 200Gb/s and 400Gb/s channels and large total capacity. Such 400Gb/s laboratory experiments typically require multiple coherent receivers, whereas our recent demonstration used a single high-bandwidth receiver.”

In the first part of this groundbreaking demonstration, 106 channels at 200Gb/s each were transmitted over 10,300km with only 33GHz channel spacing. In the second part of the experiment, the same total capacity was transmitted over 9,200km in 53 super-channels at 400Gb/s each, where each super-channel was detected by a single high-bandwidth receiver.

Press Release, April 18, 2013