Bell Labs Test Reaches 100 Gigabits Per Second

The goal of 100 Gigabits per second is within reach but not ready for commercial deployment, according to Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, which reported Wednesday that it has successfully tested the super high speed data transmission.

Bell Labs scientists, in a paper presented to the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition, reported what they said was the first notice of optical transport of electronically multiplexed 107Gbps.

"We feel 100 Gigabit Ethernet is a particularly important technology as carriers look to deploy multimedia IP services, such as IPTV, which requires networks that efficiently multiplex and transmit high amounts of IP-based data in its native Ethernet format," Martin Zirngibl, Bell Labs director, said in a statement.

Today, data transmitted over the Internet often achieves speed of 10Gbps, although it occasionally can reach 40Gbps over SONET links. The Bell Labs technology reached speeds of 107 Gbps (7 percent of the throughput is represented as overhead for error correction.)

Bell Labs said its researchers transmitted 10 channels of 107-Gbps traffic optically modulated through electrical multiplexing. The transmission covered 400 kilometers. An integrated optical equalizer, functioning as a single-chip photonic integrated circuit, played an important role in the deployment.