Fibre specialist OFS has expanded its terrestrial long-haul product line with the addition of TeraWave Ultra Low Loss (ULL) fibre, which is a large effective area fibre with better than 0.17dB/km loss at 1550nm.
Aiming at the growing market for terabit transport, TeraWave ULL fibre is an ultra-low-loss version of the TeraWave product family, which has been designed with large effective area to improve the performance of long-distance coherent systems.
Thanks to the reduction in optical nonlinearities in a larger core, TeraWave fibres can enable greater transmission distances with more wavelengths than ITU-T G.652.D fibers, reducing the need for expensive signal regeneration. Driving the loss down to even lower levels extends the reach even further.
“Two years ago we launched the fibre that was 125µm2 [effective area] and a loss of 0.19dB/km, which for terrestrial was very low. Now we have taken the next step to lower the attenuation even further down to 0.17dB/km,” explained Hans Damsgaard, managing director for OFS Denmark.
Low loss will become increasingly important as the market moves to higher speed coherent signals with more complex modulation formats and higher baud rates that have less tolerance to noise. TeraWave ULL fibre can provide 50 per cent farther reach than the best G.652.D fiber, the company claims. This means fewer regeneration sites, which helps operators save capital costs when building out their terabit networks.