Imagine 15 million people connected to broadband Internet at the same time across the Pacific Ocean through a single fiber as thin as a hair! This is what is happening today with 40 Gbit/s technologies in Alcatel's laboratories. But the technology is not confined to the lab anymore: Alcatel has successfully deployed its 40 Gbit/s solution to connect the data centers at two German universities (Stuttgart and Karlsruhe) located 105 km apart.

The direct link between the two supercomputers in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe delivers a computing power of over twenty teraflops*, equivalent to more than twenty trillion operations per second, for business and educational applications. This makes it the fastest data line in Germany and positions it in the top five supercomputer centers in the world.

Detailed 3D simulations in real time such as car-crash tests and process simulations or transmitting 1.3 million pages of text in a second are just some of the applications enabled by the new 40 Gbit/s line.

As today's voice and data traffic increases by 115% per year**, 40 Gbit/s optical transmission is clearly the solution of the future to cope with this growth in submarine, terrestrial and metropolitan networks.