[updated Sat. 09/22]
At the recent ECOC European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication which closed its doors yesterday in Berlin, Germany, Alcatel-Lucent researchers delivered post-deadline papers that remind me the good old days of the pre-Bubble era (i.e. when Marketing was not the ruler).
Among several outstanding breakthroughs (for fiberoptics technology- savvy guys ;-) : the transmission of 12.8 Tbit/s of data through a single optical fiber over a record distance of 2,550 km, and a 8-Tbit/s WDM transmission with 80 channels, each modulated at 100 Gbits/sec, transmitted over 520 km
A few facts for novices : a data rate of 1 Terabit per second represents roughly 12 millions telephone landlines; ten years ago, the transmission record was set around 3 Tbit/s, equivalent to approximately 40 millions lines; in late 2000, the record was at 6.5 Tbit/s, allowing the transmission of 1 million motion pictures over a single fiber at a time.
As stated by french pioneer and researcher Emmanuel Desurvire in his paper "Optical Communications in 2025", presented at ECOC'05 : " 20-years objectives can only be reached though tech-driven research and there is an urgent need to get started."
It seems AlcatelLucent got started again, leaving marketing behind the labs' s doors for the sake of the whole Fiber Optics industry.
