A team of researchers (including BICSI corporate member Modular Photonics [part of Macquarie University], from Australia, Japan, Holland and Italy have set a new speed record for an industry standard optical fibre, achieving 1.7 Petabits – the equivalent to the combined speed of 17 million NBN broadband internet connections – over a 67 km length of fibre.
The fibre, which contains 19 cores, meets the global standards for fibre size ensuring that it can be adopted without massive infrastructure change. And it uses less digital processing, greatly reducing the power required per bit transmitted.
Macquarie University researchers developed a glass chip, which was essential to the creation of the 19-core optical fibre.
“We’ve created a compact glass chip with a wave-guide pattern etched into it by 3D laser printing technology,” explained Macquarie University’s Dr Simon Gross. “It allows feeding of signals into the 19 individual cores of the fibre simultaneously with uniform low losses. Other approaches are limited in the number of cores and result in the loss of too much light, which reduces the efficiency of the transmission system.
“It’s been exciting to work with the Japanese leaders in optical fibre technology. I hope we’ll see this technology in subsea cables within five to 10 years.”
Another researcher involved in the team and BICSI member, Professor Michael Withford [pictured] from Macquarie University, believes this breakthrough in optical fibre technology has far-reaching implications, noting: “The optical chip builds on decades of research into optics at Macquarie University.”
The fibre was developed by the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology and Sumitomo Electric Industries, while the chip development was performed in collaboration with the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, University of L’Aquila in Italy and Sydney’s Macquarie University.
The latest generation of subsea cables, such as the Grace Hopper cable that went into service in 2022, carries 22 Terabits in each of 16 fibre pairs. However, that’s still not enough to meet the demand for streaming TV, video conferencing and all our other forms of global communication.
“Decades of optics research around the world has allowed the industry to push more and more data through single fibres,” added Dr Gross. “We could increase capacity by using thicker fibres. But this would be less flexible, more fragile, less suitable for long-haul cables, and would require massive reengineering of optical fibre infrastructure. Or we could just add more fibres, but each fibre adds equipment overhead and cost and we’d need a lot more fibres.
“To meet the growing demand for movement of data, telecommunication companies need technologies that offer greater data flow for reduced cost. The new fibre contains 19 cores that can each carry a signal, a ground-breaking development that can achieve this.