According to the team, the transmission was achieved using innovative technology that contains two carrier frequencies, two polarisation planes, 16-QAM quadrature amplitude modulation and digital offline signal processing for the equalisation of fibre influences.

"Together with our technology partner Alcatel-Lucent and the experts at Telekom Network Production, we are very proud of having attained this tremendous transmission performance over the Internet under real-world conditions," said Heinrich Arnold, T-Labs manager.

"With them, we have successfully developed an innovative method by which the transmission capacity of optical fibre can be increased significantly in network operation".