Lucent Demonstrates 100-Gbit Ethernet Transmission

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs reported Wednesday (March 8) at the Optical Fibers in Communications (OFC) conference that is has achieved 100-Gbit/s Ethernet signal transmission over 400 km using dispersion-compensated fiber.

Bell Labs Director Martin Zirngibl said a hybrid amplifier using both erbium-doped fiber and Raman amps was used, achieving an aggregate data rate of 107 Gbits/s. That represents forward-error-correcting overhead which could be used in a commercial 100-Gbit Ethernet network.

The transmission experiments build on earlier work at Bell Labs involving 40-Gbit/s Sonet transmission, though Zirngibl said no experiments had attempted such high rates of framed Ethernet data over such long distances. The transmission employed ten-channel electronic multiplexing, and used an integrated optical equalizer single-chip IC. Spectral efficiency of 0.7 bits/s/Hz was achieved.

At OFC, Lucent’s multimedia networking solutions group announced successful field trials with Japan Telecom of a production 40-Gbit/s network utilizing Lucent’s LambdaXtreme DWDM transport system. "This was not an extended lab experiment, Japan Telecom was carrying real traffic," said David Brown senior marketing manager.

Lucent demonstrated a working interface between its DWDM platform and a high-capacity router carrying IP traffic over an OC-768 channel.