Reaching the pinnacle of high-capacity optical transmission using a standard cladding diameter coupled-core multi-core fiber

Data rates in optical networks have grown exponentially in recent decades and are expected to grow beyond the fundamental limits of current standard single-mode fiber networks. As such, novel transmission technologies are required to sustain this growth, and space-division multiplexing provides the most promising candidate to scale the capacity of optical networks in a way that is also cost-effective. For fiber fabrication and deployment, it is highly beneficial to use fibers with a standard cladding diameter. Here we demonstrate petabit-per-second-class data transmission using a space-division multiplexing fiber that approaches the limits of spatial multiplexing whilst minimizing the required signal processing complexity. This is done by designing and fabricating a low-loss 19-core multi-core fiber with randomly-coupled cores, a standard cladding diameter, and supporting a wideband wavelength-division multiplexed signal. The resulting data rate of 1.7 petabit/s is the highest reported amongst standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers and is approximately more than an order of magnitude higher than is supported by currently deployed single-mode fibers, paving the way for next-generation ultra-fast optical transmission networks.