Sumitomo Electric Achieves World Record With Optical Fiber

The NICT and Sumitomo Electric presented a paper at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2025 on April 3, 2025. Their presentation showed a new world record achievement for “capacity-distance product” in a transmission demonstration using a standard cladding diameter optical fiber. The former record of “capacity-distance product” had been achieved with an uncoupled 4-core fiber to transmit 0.138 petabits per second over 12,345 km. The new world record set by Sumitomo Electric and the NICT achieved data transmission at 1.02 petabits per second over 1,808 kilometers. To reach this new horizon, the NICT was in charge of the design and development of the transmission system, as well as the transmission experiments, while Sumitomo Electric worked on the design and development of the coupled 19-core optical fiber.

Per Sumitomo Electric’s press release, “In this demonstration, Sumitomo Electric was responsible for the design and manufacture of a coupled 19-core optical fiber that features a standard cladding diameter, achieving a reduction in optical fiber losses across multiple wavelength ranges (the C-band and the L-band) by optimizing the structure and arrangement of the cores. Meanwhile, NICT was responsible for building a transmission system that maximizes the performance of the fiber, as well as developing and demonstrating an optical amplification relay function capable of simultaneously amplifying signals from all 19 cores.”

This technology is anticipated to help with the growth of communication capacity and the long-range extension of optical communication infrastructure in the future, as it is expected for communication demand to increase.