Winter 2018 Optical Connections Magazine

The FTTH market is reliant on test and management tools

APPLICATIONS & RESEARCH

JohnWilliamson – see page 8

World-first Optical Fibre Transmits At Over 1 Petabps

A world-first optical fibre has been developed in Australia that can transmit data at 1.2 Petabps. This is 12 million times quicker than the country’s fastest National Broadband Network (NBN) connection. The dramatic improvement scientists from the Macquarie University Photonics Research Centre, a fibre jointly developed by Hokkaido University and Fujikura Ltd, and the transmission system developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japan (NICT). The fibre researchers note that Internet data use is increasing exponentially, due to developments such as on-demand streaming and artificial intelligence, and we are fast approaching the limits of existing communications networks. They add that research into new types of optical fibre that can transmit ultra-large volumes of data have to date The Ethernet Alliance (EA) has announced its next Ethernet Higher Speed Networking Plugfest for port data rates ranging from 25 Gbits/s to 400 Gbits/s. The week-long event – beginning December. 3, 2018, at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) in Durham, NH – is designed to allow EA members, equipment manufacturers, test and measurement professionals, etc. to test and improve interoperability of their solutions. In addition, members of the 100G Lambda Multisource Agreement (MSA) Group also are invited to attend the plugfest, under terms in speed was enabled by a coupler developed by

said Dr Simon Gross from the Macquarie Photonics Research Centre. “This technology promises a solution to the bottleneck created by existing optical fibres. For the first time, we have created a realistic and useable-sized fibre which is resilient and can transport huge amounts of data. It also represents a big cost saving over installing the 12 standard optical fibres you would need to transport the same volume of data.” super-fast, ultra-broadband communications.” “Present-day optical communications are heading towards a ‘capacity crunch’ as they fail to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of Big Data,” Ren said. “What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth.” Current optical communications use only a fraction of light’s actual capacity by carrying data on the colour spectrum. New broadband technologies under development use the oscillation of light waves to encode data and increase bandwidth.”

significant cost-savings over other types of fibres. The fibre has applications in transmitting data between datacentres, metropolitan networks, or undersea communications cables, with the ability to smoothly accommodate traffic for big data and 5G services. “The world’s insatiable demand for data means that we are approaching a ‘capacity crunch’ and need to find new ways to transport ever-larger volumes,”

resulted in thick fibres that are vulnerable to damage from bending and pulling. The four-core, three- mode fibre developed by Hokkaido University and Fujikura Ltd is almost the same width as existing standard optical fibres but can transmit 12 times as much data per second. Its narrower diameter means it is less prone to damage and can easily be cabled and connected using existing equipment, resulting in of a new memorandum of understanding (MoU) between that industry consortium and the EA. “With so much technology development underway and transpiring on different timeframes, industry is more and more often demanding opportunities for trustworthy interoperability testing for their solutions. This is a role for which the Ethernet Alliance has grown globally respected,” said Dave Chalupsky, Plugfest Chair and Board Member, Ethernet Alliance, and Network Product Architect, Intel Corporation. “Ethernet is amid significant and historic growth, with so many new standards activities coming out over the last two years and still rolling out.”

RMIT optical breakthrough to allow 100x faster internet

Ethernet networking interoperability testing speeds up

A new form of “twisted” light, developed at RMIT, Melbourne Australia, can encode more data and process it much faster than conventional fibre optics. The developers say that their “twisted light beams” could lead to an Internet that is 100 times faster than today’s typical standard. A detailed paper on this world-first nanophotonic device has just been published in Nature Communications. Dr Haoran Ren from RMIT’s School of Science, Melbourne, Australia, who was co-lead author of the paper, said the tiny nanophotonic device they have built for reading twisted light is the “missing key required to unlock

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| ISSUE 15 | Q4 2018

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