Marconi Demos Fiber Transmission System at SuperComm

Marconi Corp. Wednesday unveiled a fiber transmission system that offers tremendous bandwidth over long distances.

After demonstrating the system at the SuperComm 2001 trade show in Atlanta, Marconi said the SmartPhotonix UPLX 160 provides a maximum bandwidth of 1.6 Tbits per second for up to 3,000 kilometers without requiring expensive equipment to regenerate the signal. That's the equivalent of 160 wavelengths, each running at 10 Gbits per second.

The company says the system will provide savings to service providers by eliminating the need for electrical regenerators, which are used to drive optical signals over long distances in backbone networks.

"Although it's difficult to predict when service providers will be implementing such a super-high-capacity system in their backbone networks, the Marconi system has the potential to keep service provider networks unclogged for a very long time despite soaring volumes of data traffic," says Maribel Dolinov, senior telecom analyst at Forrester Research.

Marconi says the system will be out this fall but did not reveal pricing.