Chinese telecommunications equipment company ZTE Corp. claims to have broken the world record for a single-channel data transmission with a rate of 10 terabits per second over 640-kilometers of optical fiber. This is  equivalent of sending 160 high definition movies every second. 

“With OFC’s acknowledgement of our research result in 100G and beyond-100G technology, we will go on to invest further efforts in high-speed optical transmission and apply further research results in the pending 100G global deployment,”  Fan Xiaobing, General Manager of ZTE bearer network product line, said.

The experiment used ZTE’s patented “carrier generation technology” to generate 112 coherent and frequency-locked optical sub-carrier signals; with each sub-carrier bearing 100-Gbps optical signals, and successfully achieved optical signals with a single-channel rate of 11.2-Tbps, a payload line rate of 10-Tbps rate plus overheads such as forward error correction (FEC).