The latest December edition of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters includes
our publication entitled 1.6-Tb/s (40×40 Gb/s) Transmission Over 44..94 km of SSMF With Adaptive Chromatic Dispersion Compensation.
In short, it is summarized as follows. We transmitted 40 channels, each can carry 40 Gb/s data, in a distance up to 94 km. That’s indeed not really new. But, in our experiment, at the receiver we needed ony one multichannel dispersion compensator that is able to compensate the different dispersion of all channels. The said compensator is even adjustable (thermally tunable), that’s why the transmission distance could be easily varied (e.g. as short as 44 km). Interestingly, the compensator did have just enough bandwidth because it was initially designed for 10 Gb/s transmission. Both amplitude and phase modulation gave satisfactory performance.
To imagine the capacity, this is equivalent to transporting approximately 45 standard DVDs in just one second.
And actually this experiment is a bit outdated. In last year’s European Conference on Optical Communication (whereby I had the chance to visit Glasgow), I have presented the follow-up experiment in which the rate is further pushed to reach approximately 6000 Gb/s.