Bandwidth-distance product

Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHz×km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHz×km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km.

Through a combination of advances in dispersion management, wavelength-division multiplexing, and optical amplifiers, modern-day optical fibers can carry information at around 14 Terabits per second over 160 kilometers of fiber .[4] Engineers are always looking at current limitations in order to improve fiber-optic communication, and several of these restrictions are currently being researched. For instance, NTT was able to achieve 69.1 Tbit/s transmission by applying wavelength division multiplex (WDM) of 432 wavelengths with a capacity of 171 Gbit/s over a single 240 km-long optical fiber on March 25, 2010. This has been the highest optical transmission speed ever recorded.

The per-channel light signals propagating in the fiber have been modulated at rates as high as 111 gigabits per second by NTT, although 10 or 40 Gbit/s is typical in deployed systems.Each fiber can carry many independent channels, each using a different wavelength of light (wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)). The net data rate (data rate without overhead bytes) per fiber is the per-channel data rate reduced by the FEC overhead, multiplied by the number of channels (usually up to eighty in commercial dense WDM systems as of 2008). The current laboratory fiber optic data rate record, held by Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, is multiplexing 155 channels, each carrying 100 Gbit/s over a 7000 km fiber.

June 6, 2011

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