50.47-Tbit/s Standard Cladding Coupled 4-Core Fiber Transmission Over 9,150 km

Since optical submarine cable systems are a part of the global communications infrastructure, their total capacity must be continuously and dramatically enlarged. Recently, methods how to maximize the transmission capacity under electrical power limitations have been studied, and it has been reported that a single band (C-band only) transmission system with more fiber pairs (FPs) could be a promising technology. This finding has triggered work on submarine cables with more FPs. For a further increase in FPs in optical submarine cable systems, which also have space limitations in existing cable designs, space-division multiplexing (SDM) technologies such as multi-core fibers (MCFs) and multi-mode fibers (MMFs) could be promising solutions. In particular, 125-μm standard cladding SDM fibers are attractive for early deployment in submarine cable systems since they are expected to have high productivity and high mechanical reliability similar to existing single-mode fibers (SMFs) with the same cladding diameter. In this paper, we report transpacific MCF transmission over a 30-nm bandwidth using standard cladding ultralow-loss coupled 4-core fibers, extending our previous work. The Q
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-factors of 608 (4 core × 152 WDM) SDM/WDM channels modulated with 24-Gbaud DP (dual polarization)-QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) exceeded the assumed forward error correction (FEC) limits after a 9,150-km transmission. As a result, transmission capacity of 50.47 Tbit/s and a capacity-distance product of 461.8 Pbit/s·km were achieved for standard cladding diameter SDM fibers.