NEC Corporation, OCC Corporation and Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. complete first trial of submarine cable with multicore fiber

Tokyo, October 4, 2021, NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701), its subsidiary OCC Corporation and Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. (Sumitomo Electric; TSE: 5802) announced today that they have completed the first trial of uncoupled (*1) 4-core submarine fiber cable (*2), and verified its transmission performance to meet the exacting demands of global telecommunications networks.

International data usage is expected to expand by 30-40% CAGR from 2020-2026 (*3), driven by factors such as the growth of 5G mobile data, and the need to share ever more content between data centers distributed around the world. To meet this demand, submarine networks are adopting space division multiplexing (SDM) technology, where the number of independent spatial channels is increased to maximize total system capacity, reduce power consumption and optimize cost per bit. Multicore fiber is now expected to further increase the number of parallel optical fiber cores without increasing the submarine cable size and structure, enabling the second generation of submarine SDM systems.