Huawei and Vodafone complete first 2 Tbit/s WDM field trial

Shenzhen, China and London, England--Huawei and Vodafone (the world’s second-largest mobile communications company) announced the successful trial of 2 Tbit/s wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) fiber-optic transmission technologies on Vodafone’s live network. The field trial achieved 2 Tbit/s transmission capabilities over a 3325 km length, a data-highway capacity 20 times higher than current commercially deployed 100 Gbit/s systems. This could lead to advanced optical transport systems with capacities far beyond the existing 100G technology, says Huawei.

Traffic on carrier backbone networks is growing exponentially, driving commercial 100G deployments and attracting attention on optical transport beyond 100G. Relying on technologies such as flex-optical digital signal processing (Flex-ODSP), super soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC), and flex modulation format, the field trial achieved a record-breaking transmission distance of 1500 km using a super-channel polarization-division multiplexing quadrature amplitude-modulation (PDM-16QAM)-based high-spectral-efficiency approach, and a second record-breaking transmission distance of 3325 km using a super-channel Nyquist PDM-QPSK-based ultra-long-haul system.

Both transmissions were on a link with G.652 fibers (which are very widely used) and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) without electrical regeneration. The link used in the trial was on Vodafone's backbone network, passing through a few cities across central and southern Germany.

In 2012, Huawei conducted what it said was the world's first 2T WDM field trial and pan-European 400G field trial.