LONDON -- BT and Huawei today announced field trial speeds of up to three Terabits per second (Tbps), believed to be the fastest real-time super channel speeds ever achieved over an existing fibre link using commercial grade hardware and software in a real world operational environment. The speeds are the equivalent to transmitting around 100 uncompressed HD films in a single second.

The record transmission, which was conducted over a 359 kilometre field fibre link between BT’s Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk and the BT Tower in London, used an advanced ‘Flexgrid’ infrastructure with Huawei’s OSN 9800/8800 and iManager U2000 platform. This approach increases the capacity on a fibre cable by compressing the gaps between transmission channels, usually set at 50GHz. The technique increases the density of channels on a fibre, making it around 50 percenti more efficient than today’s typical core network links.

The results demonstrate how BT’s core fibre optic infrastructure could work even more efficiently in the future, reducing the need to invest in more cables as bandwidth demands from consumers and businesses continue to grow.

BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA)