'Fastest ever' broadband speeds achieved in fibre test

Alcatel-Lucent and BT have today announced trial speeds of up to 1.4Tb/s with a record spectral efficiency of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz (b/s/Hz) on an existing core fiber connection. This is believed to be the fastest speed ever achieved in commercial grade hardware in a real-world environment and is equivalent to transmitting 44 uncompressed HD films in a single second.

The field trial, conducted over an existing fiber link between the BT Tower in London and BT's Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk, used a new 'flexible grid' infrastructure (Flexgrid) to vary the gaps between transmission channels, usually set at 50 Gigahertz (GHz). By increasing the density of channels on the fiber, this approach achieved up to 42.5 percent greater data transmission efficiency compared to today's standard networks.

The trial demonstrated that use of the Flexgrid approach can increase BT's core network capacity using existing optical fibers, potentially reducing the expense of laying more fiber as bandwidth demands grow. This could allow BT to more easily scale its core network capacity to meet consumer and business demands for more bandwidth-hungry services such as streaming video, whilst more efficiently using its existing core fiber infrastructure.

"It's a reaction to the growth in demand for video content," the managing director of technology analyst firm Telsyte, Foad Fadaghi, said. "It's about reducing the cost of carrying vast amounts of data over the coming years."

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