Nokia breaks transoceanic cable systems record, world keeps spinning

Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks and Nokia Bell Labs have jointly announced they’ve broken another record which very few people knew about in the first place.

The pair have achieved a record transmission capacity over a 6,600 km single mode fibre, demonstrating a total 65 Tbps transmission using ‘submarine grade dual band erbium doped fibre amplifiers’. Seriously, that’s an actual quote. You couldn’t make it up.

“This new record is the latest in a long series of achievements by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks over the past 20 years, with breakthroughs that have transformed long distance data transmission,” said a giddy Olivier Gautheron, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks.

“It also underlines our strategic focus on R&D to raise the bar for undersea fibre-optic technology as our researchers continue to develop new solutions to help traditional and webscale operators cope with increasing requirements for speed, capacity and cost-effectiveness”

The trial itself used Bell Labs’ Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS) technology, which uses non-uniform transmission of constellation symbols by reducing the occurrence of high power symbols. The technique provides greater resilience to noise and other impairments. The 65 Tbps transmission is equivalent to more than 10 million HDTV channels streamed simultaneously, because that’s how much we need nowadays.

Telecoms.com gained exclusive access to Mr Sliced Bread, widely acclaimed as the greatest thing ever, who didn’t seem at all bothered with the announcement:

“I mean, it’s alright innit, but it’s just really doing their job like,” said Mr Bread. “They can shout all they like but I’m still the greatest and I don’t think many people will give that much of a sh*t. When they’ve actually done something that’s worth thinking about I’ll start worrying about my butter, but right now I’m still the boss and they can kiss my jam.”