The world's first three-band multi-core optical cable is officially operational in Qingdao

On June 2, Science and Technology Daily reported that the world's first ultra-low-loss multi-core optical cable line using S+C+L three-band fusion technology was officially completed and put into operation in Qingdao, Shandong.

This marks that my country has made a key breakthrough in the field of space division multiplexing optical fiber and multi-band collaborative transmission. Optical communication technology has officially entered a new stage of commercial development, providing a new technical solution for computing power interconnection in the intelligent era.

It is reported that in the field of optical communication, S-band, C-band and L-band correspond to the short-wave band, conventional communication band and long-wave band respectively. The collaboration of the three is the core direction of AI computing power, all-optical network and the evolution from 5G-A to 6G.

Traditional optical fibers are limited by the number of fiber cores and available bandwidth, and there are obvious bottlenecks in transmission capacity, making it difficult to meet the actual demand for exponential growth in data traffic. The new optical cable deployed in Qingdao this time adopts a four-core optical fiber architecture, integrating four independent signal channels in an optical fiber as thin as a hair.

This optical cable extends the characteristics of ultra-low loss and large effective area from C and L bands to S band, realizing three-band parallel transmission. This is equivalent to widening the information highway from two lanes to three lanes and opening up multiple parallel lanes within one optical fiber. According to estimates, the single-core bandwidth has increased by nearly 50%, and the capacity of a single optical fiber has reached more than 5 times that of traditional optical fibers, which can meet the needs of AI intelligent computing and T-bit ultra-high-speed transmission.

It is understood that this optical cable was independently designed and completed by China Mobile in cooperation with domestic industry partners. It is independently controllable from core technology research and development to engineering application, breaking the key technical barriers in the field of optical communications for a long time.

Looking to the future, as applications such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things continue to explode, global data traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate, placing higher requirements on the bandwidth, latency, and energy efficiency of the underlying transmission network. The commissioning of this new optical cable in Qingdao not only provides high-capacity, low-loss physical layer support for domestic computing network construction, but also provides a Chinese solution for the technological evolution of the global optical communications industry.