Siemens claims net speed record

German equipment vendor Siemens said that it has successfully tested data rates of 107Gbps and transmission over a 100 mile fibre optic route in the US.

The test was carried out in cooperation with Micram, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications (Heinrich-Hertz-Institut) and Eindhoven Technical University.

Siemens claims the demonstration is the first time such speeds have ever been achieved outside the laboratory.

"The record performance was made possible by a newly developed transmission and receiving system that processes the data by purely electrical means directly before and after its conversion into optical signals," Siemens said.

Siemens tested the network in anticipation that ultra-high bandwidth capacity in the core network will be required to cater for the traffic generated by online games, music and video downloads.

By 2011, legal music downloads alone are expected to account for 36 per cent of the entire music business in Europe, according to market research firm Forrester Research.

"In the spring of 2006 we demonstrated the system with a fully electric receiver," said Rainer Derksen, project coordinator at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich.

"At that time we were still using optical multiplexing in the transmitter. Now we've designed a complete system with 100 per cent electrical processing of the data in both the receiver and the transmitter."

Siemens claims that it is already theoretically possible to process the signals from 100,000 DSL users simultaneously. Derksen expects that the first products based on the prototype will be available on the market within a few years.