NEC brings AI to submarine cable networks

Tokyo, Japan and Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., May 15, 2018 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today successful transmission tests that took place over a commercial subsea cable measuring more than 10,000 kilometers using artificial intelligence (AI) and probabilistic shaping at a modulation of 64QAM. NEC, in a joint research publication with Google, has demonstrated for the first time that the FASTER open subsea cable can be upgraded to a spectral efficiency of 6 bits per second per hertz (b/s/Hz) in an 11,000km segment. This represents a capacity of more than 26 terabits per second (Tb/s) in the C-band, which is over 2½ times the capacity originally planned for the cable, for no additional wet plant capital expenditure. In doing so, the authors set a spectral efficiency-distance product record of 66,102 b/s/Hz in a field trial performed together with live traffic neighboring channels. The team achieved this result using near-Shannon probabilistic-shaping at a modulation of 64QAM, and for the first time on a live cable, artificial intelligence (AI) was used to analyze data for the purpose of nonlinearity compensation (NLC).