Gathering the latest advancements in optical fiber telecommunications technology towards practical petabit-class backbone networks

The Network System Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: Hideyuki Tokuda, Ph.D.) has developed and demonstrated the first large-scale optical switching testbed capable of handling 1 Petabit per second optical signals. 1 Petabit per second is equivalent to the capacity to send 8K video to 10 million people simultaneously.

This demonstration made use of state-of-the-art large-scale and low-loss optical switches based on MEMS technology, three types of next-generation spatial-division multiplexing fibers, and included the routing of signals with capacities from 10 Terabit per second to 1 Petabit per second. This corresponds to more than 100 times the capacity of currently available networks.

This is a major step forward towards the early implementation of the petabit-class backbone optical networks capable of supporting the increasing requirements of internet services such as broadband video streaming, 5G mobile networks or the Internet of Things. As such, the results of this demonstration were acknowledged by the scientific community with a post-deadline presentation at the 45th European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2019). {module In-article}