Nokia Bell Labs said that its researchers have set the world record for the highest single carrier bit rate at 1.52 Terabits per second (Tbit/s) over 80 km of standard single mode fiber. That is the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 1.5 million YouTube videos, four times the market’s current state-of-the-art of approximately 400 Gigabits per second.

The company said in a statement that this world record, along with other optical networking innovations announced today, will further strengthen Nokia’s ability to develop networks for the 5G era that meet the ever-growing data, capacity and latency demands of industrial IoT and consumer applications. Several of these achievements were presented as part of research papers at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference & Exhibition in San Diego. Additionally, Nokia Bell Labs researcher Di Che was awarded the OFC Tingye Li Innovation Prize.

“It has been fifty years since the inventions of the low-loss fiber and the associated optics. From the original 45 Megabit-per-second systems to more than 1 Terabit-per-second systems of today, a more than 20,000-fold increase in 40 years, to create the fundamental underpinning of the internet and the digital societies as we know it. The role of Nokia Bell Labs has always been to push the envelope and redefine the limits of what’s possible. Our latest world records in optical research are yet another proof point that we are inventing even faster and more robust networks that will underpin the next industrial revolution,” said Marcus Weldon, Nokia CTO and President of Nokia Bell Labs.

The highest single-carrier bitrate at 1.52 Terabits per second was set by a research team led by Fred Buchali. This record was established by employing a new 128 Gigasample/second converter enabling the generation of signals at 128 Gbaud symbol rate and information rates of the individual symbols beyond 6.0 bits/symbol/polarization. This accomplishment breaks the team’s own record of 1.3 Tbit/s set in September 2019 while supporting  record-breaking field trial with Etisalat.

Di Che and team also set a new data-rate world record for directly modulated lasers (DML). The team achieved a world record data rate beyond 400 Gbit/s for links up to 15 km. In addition to these world records, Nokia Bell Labs researchers have also recently reached significant achievements in optical communications, including the first field trial using spatial-division-multiplexed (SDM) cable over a 2,000km span of 4-core coupled-core fiber; a novel new set of modulation formats that provide improved linear and nonlinear transmission performance at submarine distances of 10,000 km; and an experimental demonstration of capacity gains of 23% for submarine cable systems that operate under electrical supply power constraints.