OFS says TeraWave ULL fiber offers longer optical reach, lower loss for 400G, terabit networking

At the recent ECOC 2015 (Sept. 27 - Oct 1), fiber-optic network products specialist OFS announced that it is expanding its terrestrial long haul product line with the addition of its TeraWave Ultra Low Loss (ULL) fiber, which the company says supports a 50% greater effective area than G.652.D fiber, and less than 0.17 dB/km loss at 1550 nm.

Aiming at the growing market for terabit transport, OFS' TeraWave ULL fiber offering is an ultra low loss version of the TeraWave fiber designed to improve the performance of long distance coherent systems. The TeraWave fibers can enable greater transmission distances with more wavelengths than ITU-T G.652.D fibers, reducing the need for expensive signal regeneration.

OFS' G.654 terrestrial product line was launched with TeraWave singlemode fiber in April 2014 with low optical loss (less than 0.19 dB/km at 1550 nm) to improve the system power budget. With the introduction of TeraWave ULL fiber, the loss has been further reduced to 0.17 dB/km at 1550 nm.

OFS contends that its TeraWave and TeraWave ULL fiber offer a combination of optimized effective area of 125 square microns, excellent cabling performance, and reduced attenuation compared to conventional ITU-T G.652.D single-mode fibers. These benefits improve coherent transport, including higher spectral efficiency at 100 Gb/s and improved regeneration distances at 400 Gb/s.

Pierre Marty, vice president of sales and marketing for OFS, comments, "OFS has a long heritage of development and commercialization of optical fibers specially designed for submarine and long haul applications. Building upon this experience OFS is now offering our customers longer optical reach enabled by TeraWave ULL fiber, which can provide 50% farther reach than the best G.652.D fiber. This means fewer regeneration sites, which helps our customers save capital costs in building their terabit networks."