At the BICSI Fall Conference and Exhibition 2015, Las Vegas, OFS announced the commercial availability of LaserWave FLEX WideBand multimode fibre, designed to meet the demanding requirements for today’s OM4 applications inside data centres, as well as next-generation short-wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM) applications.
Building on the heritage of bend-optimised LaserWave FLEX 550 optical fibre, LaserWave FLEX WideBand fibre meets and is fully backwards compatible with current OM4 requirements while extending the ability of conventional OM4 multimode fibre to support multiple wavelengths.
Unlike traditional multimode fibre, which is optimised for transmission at the single wavelength of 850nm, LaserWave FLEX WideBand fibre will support traffic over a range of wavelengths from 850nm to 950nm. This will enable multiple lanes of traffic over the same strand of fibre, significantly improving the bandwidth capacity of multimode fibre while maintaining its cost advantages for short-distance applications of up to 300m. The new fibre will support four-wavelength 100Gb/s applications, while providing bandwidth for tomorrow’s 400Gb/s and higher speeds.
“We have been working to offer data centre end users a solution for 400G transmission and SWDM provides the possibility of duplex 100G links while allowing a graceful 400G solution using only eight fibres,” said Andrew Oliviero, senior director, product line management, research and development for OFS. “WDM technology is well known for its use in singlemode transmission, but has only recently been adapted for use with vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers [VCSELs], used in short-wave multimode applications. The use of SWDM in these applications enables multimode fibre to maintain the cost advantage of multimode fibre systems over singlemode fibre in short links and greatly increases the total link capacity.”