Nokia Achieves Record 65Tbps Transmission On Undersea Cables

Nokia has achieved a record transmission rate of 65Tbps on a submarine cable, claiming the advent could help increase the capacity of transoceanic networks and help meet ever growing demand for consumer and business services.

The Finnish networking giant’s Bell Labs and Alcatel Lucent Submarine Networks (ALSN), both of which acquired in the £11.2 billion takeover of Alcatel-Lucent last year, conducted the test using Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS) technology.

It is claimed the use of Bell Lab’s PCS system helps signals adapt to changing conditions and provides more resilience to noise and other impairments by using intelligent non-uniform transmission.

Under the sea

“The future digital existence where everyone, everything and every system and process is connected will require a massive increase in network capacity and the ability to dynamically optimise this capacity,” said Marcus Weldon, Nokia CTO and president of Bell Labs.

“Probabilistic Constellation Shaping extends the limits of current optical transmission by utilising novel modulation techniques to dramatically improve the performance and capacity needed for the new digital era that will be enabled by the Future X Network.”

PCS was also used in a separate trial in Germany between Nokia, Deutsche Telekom and the Technical university of Munich to achieve speeds of 1Tbps on terrestrial networks.

The submarine record rate is the equivalent of more than 10 million high definition television channels streamed simultaneously and is 13,000 times the capacity available on the first undersea amplified transatlantic system installed two decades ago.

“This new record is the latest in a long series of achievements by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks over the past 20 years, with breakthroughs that have transformed long distance data transmission,” boasted Olivier Gautheron, CTO of ALSN.

“It also underlines our strategic focus on R&D to raise the bar for undersea fibre-optic technology as our researchers continue to develop new solutions to help traditional and webscale operators cope with increasing requirements for speed, capacity and cost-effectiveness.”

It had been thought Nokia might dispose of ALSN when the merger was completed but instead the organisation was retained as a subsidiary.

Think you know all about Nokia? Take our quiz!