Optical Channel Capacity: 100 Gb/s, Tb/s and Beyond

100-Gb/s per channel optical transport technology development has experienced a long journey from purely academic interests to commercially viable solutions. In near future, 100-Gb/s channel will be one of the major building blocks for the next generation transport network. Beyond 100 Gb/s optical channel designs may, however, experience a paradigm change. So far, almost all commercially available optical channels, with capacity up to 100 Gb/s, are single-optical-carrier ETDM (electrical time domain multiplexing) channels. Optical channels with capacities beyond 100 Gb/s, however, will most likely be a superchannel with multiple optical carriers based on our analysis.