A world record for hollow-core fiber: 51.3 Tb/s over 206 km without repeaters.
China Telecom, Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable Joint Stock Limited Company, and Dekoli have completed the world's first field trial of a hollow-core fiber transmission system, achieving a total capacity of 51.3 Tb/s over approximately 128 miles (206 km) without signal repeaters. The test was conducted on the longest commercial cross-border hollow-core fiber cable. The results were published by TrendForce.
Key Details
- Capacity: 1.2 Tb/s per wavelength, with a total capacity of 51.3 Tb/s.
- Distance: ~128 miles (206 km) without repeaters.
- Technology: Hollow-core fiber guides light through air, reducing latency and increasing capacity compared to traditional solid-core fiber.
- Adaptive Control: An adaptive per-wavelength rate control mechanism and flexible channel power allocation were introduced to optimize transmission performance.
- Amplifier Design: A new high-power amplifier with cascaded dual-gain-unit architecture and multi-element doping achieved 33.5 dBm maximum output power and strong gain flatness.
- Safety Features: The system includes optical-path power anomaly detection, automatic interlock shutdown, and alarm-linked responses to ensure operational safety.
Significance
This field trial demonstrates the viability of hollow-core fiber for high-capacity, long-distance transmission in real-world conditions, addressing a key challenge of high-power signal stability outside the laboratory.
The technology is considered promising for next-generation optical networks, backbone infrastructure, and large-scale data centers.