13 July 2011, Shenzhen – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, today announced that it successfully achieved a signal transmission rate of 24Tb/s (24x1.3Tb/s) based on its wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology. The transmission sets a new world record in optical networking and was published as a Post Deadline Paper (PDP) at the recent Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC) 2011 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

The successful transmission follows closely after another world record that ZTE broke after the transmission of single-channel 10Tb/s optical OFDM signals at Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in March 2011. This puts ZTE in a leadership position in both the 100G and beyond-100G optical network fields.

Transmission bit rate per channel at 1Tb/s is likely to become the industry mainstream after 100G (100Gb/s), having 10 times more capacity in terms of signal bandwidth. There have been only experimental reports about single-channel transmission rate at 1Tb/s before. However, ZTE has further accomplished 24Tb/s (24x1.3Tb/s) WDM signal transmission, which was the first WDM technology that achieved Terabit/s in the industry.  

ZTE’s record-breaking 24Tb/s WDM system adopts 12 C-band signals and 12 L-band signals at the rate of 1.3Tb/s per channel (that is, the net rate of 1Tb/s after eliminating forward error correction or FEC). Each signal is received by using QPSK(Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) of Polarization Wavelength Division Multiplexing, optical OFDM modulation code format and coherent optical detection.The transmission distance is 2400km standard single mode fiber by using the standard Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA).

To overcome the challenge of ULH transmissions, the WDM system adopts external modulation technology to generate subcarrier signals that have a high signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, optical signals of different wavelengths are transparent so that the WDM system can implement multi-wavelength ULH transmission. The success of the experiment paves the way for future applications of WDM technology in 1Tb/s WDM/OTN ULH networks.

"Over the years, we have always been devoted to 100G and beyond-100G technology researches and committed ourselves to providing 100G solutions for IP network and optical transport networks. In the future, we will invest more resources to bring more of our research results to market with 100G global deployment,” said Mr. Fan Xiaobing, general manager of ZTE’s bearer network product line.

According to Ovum’s analysis report on rolling market share in 4Q10, ZTE’s annual rolling market share ranked the third in the world. ZTE first released its whole-process 100G solution in the industry in September 2010. At present, ZTE has completed system experiments of single-carrier 400G, 1T and 10T. It is expected that ZTE will release the industry-leading commercial 100G equipment in 3Q11, supporting ULH transmission with advanced technology such as coherent detection and soft-decision FEC.