Field Trial Demonstration of Real-Time Optical Superchannel Transport up to 5.6 Tb/s Over 359 km and 2 Tb/s Over a Live 727 km Flexible Grid Optical Link Using 64 GBaud Software Configurable Transponders

We report the first successful real-time optical superchannel field trials of 5.6 Tb/s over 359 km and 2 Tb/s over a live 727 km flexible grid link using production grade 64 GBaud flexible rate optical transponders. Up to 5.6 Tb/s optical superchannels were successfully demonstrated over a 359 km fully managed flexible grid optical link, where the superchannel comprises a maximum of 28 × 64 GBaud 200 G DP – QPSK subchannels. A 100 GE client signal was transported over all the subchannels, demonstrating stable, long term end-to-end error free performance. A record net spectral efficiency of 3.92 bit/s/Hz was achieved for the 64 GBaud 200 G DP – QPSK, with channel spacing as narrow as 51 GHz. We also successfully demonstrated fast superchannel capacity turn-up, via software configuration of the flexible rate transponders, from 2.6 to 5.2 Tb/s including 100 GE client mappings, which is equivalent to a capacity up-lift of approximately 2 Tb/min. In a further trial over a 727 km live flexible grid optical link between London and Dublin, we successfully demonstrated real-time 2 Tb/s superchannel transport using long reach 64 GBaud 200 G DP – QPSK operating together with 100 G DP – QPSK and 200 G DP – 16 QAM channels enabled by the flexible rate transponders. Stable, long term error free performance was measured of the terabit optical channels alongside live customer traffic.