Finnish telecom gear maker Nokia and Facebook have successfully completed multiple submarine field trials over a 5,500 km transatlantic submarine cable between New York and Ireland.
The trials were aimed at scaling the telecommunications infrastructure that supports them is a significant challenge as bandwidth-hungry applications such as video and virtual reality become accessible to more people around the world.
To increase the capacity capabilities of subsea fiber, Nokia and Facebook tested Nokia Bell Labs' new probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) technology.
“Facebook wants to increase the pace of innovation and adoption of next-generation optical technologies,” Stephen Grubb, global optical network architect at Facebook, said.
“This field trial with Nokia demonstrates that the scalable optical technology of PCS together with narrow linewidth laser sources can achieve capacities extremely close to the Shannon limit. This ensures that we are both maximizing our investment in submarine cable systems, as well as continuing to drive the cost per bit of submarine transport lower,” he added.
The test also included a successful 11,000 km round trip submarine transmission using shaped 64-QAM achieving a record spectral efficiency of 5.68 b/s/Hz and a first demonstration of 200 Gb/s and 250 Gb/s wavelengths and 16-QAM modulation over a transatlantic submarine route using a real-time coherent DSP.
The test showed an increase of almost 2.5x more capacity than the stated optical transmission capacity of the system, demonstrating the feasibility of the technology across a challenging real-world fiber-optic network.
“We are thrilled to partner with Facebook to promote our common commitment to accelerating innovation in optical transmission. By demonstrating promising areas of Nokia Bell Labs research such as PCS, as well as coherent technologies available today, we hope to chart a path forward for the industry towards higher capacities, greater reach, and more network flexibility,” Sam Bucci, head of optical networking at Nokia, said.
