China Telecom and YOFC Demonstrate 1.2Tb/s Per Wavelength and 51.3Tb/s Total Capacity on World’s Longest Commercial Cross-Border Hollow-Core Fiber Cable
Interesting Engineering reports that a consortium of Chinese companies: China Telecom, Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable (YOFC), and Dekoli, has completed the world’s first field trial of a hollow-core fiber transmission system achieving 1.2Tb/s per wavelength, reaching a total capacity of 51.3Tb/s over approximately 128 miles without signal repeaters on the world’s longest commercial cross-border hollow-core fiber cable.
Hollow-Core Fiber Transmits Light Through Air Rather Than Glass, Reducing Latency and Unlocking Capacity That Solid-Core Fiber Cannot Match
Unlike traditional fiber-optic cables that transmit light through solid glass, hollow-core fiber guides light through air — a fundamentally different design that reduces signal delay and boosts transmission capacity by addressing key limitations of conventional fiber. The team solved the challenge of high-power signal transmission in a real-world hollow-core network outside laboratory conditions for the first time. Wikipedia
The System Used Adaptive Per-Wavelength Rate Control, Cascaded Dual-Gain Amplification, and Hit 33.5 dBm Maximum Output Power for Stable Long-Distance Performance
The researchers introduced adaptive per-wavelength rate control and flexible channel power allocation, enabling hybrid transmission across multiple data rates and individually tuned power levels. A new cascaded dual-gain-unit amplifier architecture achieved 33.5 dBm maximum output power with strong gain flatness, supported by optical-path anomaly detection and automatic safety shutoffs to prevent equipment damage during high-power operation. Wikipedia
At 51.3Tb/s, a single fiber channel just transmitted the entire English Wikipedia roughly 13,000 times per second. Hollow-core is no longer a lab experiment.
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