BT And Huawei Achieve 3Tbps Fibre Record

BT and Huawei claim to have successfully achieved record speeds of 3Tbps using existing fibre infrastructure in a real-world environment, demonstrating the potential for bandwidth to be increased in the future without the need to lay new cables.

The record transmission was conducted over a 359km fibre link between BT’s Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk and the BT Tower in London and used an advanced ‘flexgrid’ infrastructure to increase the density of channels.

The gaps between transmission channels are usually set at 50MHz, but by compressing these to 33.5GHz, the cables become up to 50 percent more efficient, resulting in faster speeds. The previous record was set by BT and Alcatel-Lucent in January, where speeds of 1.4Tbps were achieved using gaps of 35GHz over a 410km fibre link.

BT fibre record

“Flexgrid technology is evolving quickly, and this trial has been invaluable in demonstrating the feasibility of this emerging technology in a real, truly testing environment,” says Neil J McRae, chief network architect at BT. “Combined with BT’s continuing investment in its network infrastructure, this outstanding breakthrough suggests we’re well-prepared for a future where new and exciting services are delivered by faster, more data-hungry applications.

“The trial result also demonstrates how we’ll be able to maximise the efficiency of BT’s existing investments, extending the life of our core network infrastructure whilst continuing to meet the needs of a 21st Century digital society.”

BT has invested billions of pounds, with additional government funding provided through the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) initiative, in its nationwide fibre network, with the predominant technology deployed being fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), which uses copper for the final few metres of the connection.

The current average superfast broadband speed in the UK is 47Mbps, according to Ofcom, but demand from consumers and businesses for faster speeds is likely to increase in the future as 4K video and cloud services become more widespread.

The flexgrid trial is the latest attempt by BT to future proof its network against future demand, with BT also working with Huawei on G.FAST technology, which boosts speeds on copper. Recent tests have achieved 800Mbps, close to the 1Gbps currently possible on commercial FTTP services.

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