Nokia has completed the first field trial of the latest fiber optic technology designed to improve the flexibility and economics of longer haul data transmission at the regional, national and submarine level. The company has achieved 500 Gbps over a single wavelength using a technology called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS), inherited from Bell Labs through its 2016 acquisition of Alcatel Lucent. The trial was with German operator M-Net as preparation for the latter’s commercial roll-out of its regional fiber network based on DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing). This comes as fiber networks, once seemingly infinite in their capacity, are getting close to running out of road as previous technologies have been driven as far as they can be economically. The…