French company Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and British Telecom have demonstrated brain-exploding, time-stopping fiber broadband speed: 1.4 Tbps (~1433 Gbps) over existing fiber network. The company also claims world record with spectral efficiency of 5.7b/s/Hz over the core network. It's believed to be the fastest speed ever achieved over commercial grade hardware in a real world environment. If 1.4 Tbps doesn't ring a bell in your head; how do you like the idea of downloading 44 full HD movies in about a second?


The trial was conducted over an existing fiber link spanning about 410 kilometers between the BT Tower in London and company's Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk. The company used flexible grid infrastructure (called Flexgrid) to vary the gaps between the transmission channels; set at about 50 GHz. The increased density of channels per fiber, the company achieved 42.5% improved data transmission efficiency over the most modern networks.

Trial was done by overlaying Alien Super Channel, comprising of about 7 - 200 Gbps channels grouped together offer a combined data transfer capacity of 1.4 Tbps. All the production equipment was used during the trial and it was reconfigurable between 200 Gbps using 16 QAM modulation and 100 Gbps using QPSK modulation. BT will be able to introduce new features and technology in their existing network without needing to make significant changes.

We would like to ask all the crazy engineers what'd they do with 1.4 Tbps?

Via: #-Link-Snipped-#