The new technique, developed by an international team of 12 organisations, offers more capacity without deployment of new fibre or much wider spectral bandwidth
An international team of 12 organisations, led by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), just set a world record of 430Tbps for data transmission across ‘standard’ telecoms fibre. It also used 20% less bandwidth overall, which, the team says, proves existing infrastructure can be improved even more without costly upgrades.
The new technique can offer more capacity without deployment of new fibre or much wider spectral bandwidth. Of the more than 5 billion kilometres of fibre deployed around the globe, most is based on single-mode fibre and could have the new technique applied, including urban area networks and data centre interconnects (the technology used to connect two or more data centres to share data and resources) where high-capacity connections are increasingly in demand.
More capacity, same fibre
Dr Aleksandr Donodin from the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AIPT – part of Aston University and pictured) which is in Birmingham, England, said, “New technology can offer more capacity without needing new fibre. It extends the capacity of standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibres well beyond the original design.
“Wavelengths below the cutoff point allow us to transmit data separately in different modes, which leads to significant increase of spectral efficiency. In this work we performed 3-mode transmission in the O-band while transmitting data in the fundamental mode in ESCL-bands.”
Researchers from AIPT were also part of the NICT-led team that set the previous world record for data transmission over standard fibre at 402Tbps.
No extra spectrum necessary
“Compared to our earlier 402 Tb/s work, this new approach shows that we don’t always need more and more spectrum to increase capacity – we can improve how efficiently we use it.”
As data-driven internet services, including AI, drive a surge in demand for optical fibre transmission bandwidth. NICT is to continue its research and aims to extend the transmission range of wideband, ultra-high-capacity systems and their compatibility for fibres already in use.
Their findings were reported as a post deadline paper at the 51st European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2025 in Denmark on 2 October and was partly supported by the Japan-Germany Beyond 5G/6G collaboration initiative.
The 12 international collaborators are NICT (Japan), Aston University (UK), Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (Germany), Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands), Politecnico di Milano and University of L’Aquila (Italy), University of Campinas (Brazil), University of Stuttgart (Germany), Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. (Japan), Macquarie University and Modular Photonics (Australia) and Nokia Bell Labs (USA).
Aston University research in this area is supported by the EPSRC Programme grant TRANSNET, Dr Donodin has been supported by Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Royal Academy of Engineering under the research fellowships.
