Telecommunications

Record-breaking fiber transmits 20x global internet traffic per second

Record-breaking fiber transmits 20x global internet traffic per second
A new optical fiber system has shattered the data transmission speed record
A new optical fiber system has shattered the data transmission speed record
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A new optical fiber system has shattered the data transmission speed record
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A new optical fiber system has shattered the data transmission speed record

Everybody feels like they could use a faster internet connection, and now engineers in Japan have shattered the record for data transmission. The team managed to transmit more than 20 times the global internet traffic per second through a single optical fiber.

If you’re one of the lucky few people to be connected to the world’s fastest consumer internet connection, you’ll be enjoying a breezy 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s). A bigger group is running a 1-Gb/s connection, while most of us get by on a few hundred megabits per second.

But now, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has clocked an absolutely insane data transmission rate of 22.9 petabits per second. To put that in perspective, a petabit is one million gigabits, so that’s fast enough to transmit the entire internet’s second-by-second traffic 22 times over with bandwidth left over. Even NASA only gets 46 terabits per second, or 0.046 Pb/s.

To reach this milestone, NICT took advantage of a few emerging technologies. Instead of just one core for transmitting data, the cable contains 38, each of which can transmit data in three modes for a total of 114 spatial channels. Each mode in each spatial channel is made up of 750 wavelength channels across three bands (S,C and L), for a bandwidth of 18.8 THz.

Altogether, that adds up to a data transmission rate of 22.9 Pb/s, which is more than twice the previous record, set in 2020. The team says that optimizing the error correction could allow the system in its current form to reach speeds of up to 24.7 Pb/s.

However, don’t expect to be streaming the entirety of Netflix in fractions of a second in the near future. Decoding the data involves complex signal processing, which would require specialized devices called MIMO receivers to be installed throughout networks. In the shorter term, a four-core version that only transmits data in one mode per core is compatible with existing infrastructure, and still manages a respectable data speed of over 1 Pb/s.

The research was presented at the European Conference on Optical Communication in Scotland in October.

Source: NICT

3 comments
3 comments
Mark R Windsor
"20 times the global internet traffic per second" - the "per second" is redundant - in fact just wrong.
Why is the mistake so often made, e.g. "enough energy from the wind farm to supply 2000 houses per year". No, not "per year". That energy is continuously supplied until the wind farm dies, supplying the energy for 2000 houses every second and every year.
Michael Irving
@Mark R Windsor: The "per second" is key to the whole thing – we're talking about data transmission rates here, which are literally measured in (mega/giga/tera/peta)bits per second. Also global internet traffic is a fluid thing to measure, so we need to break it down into understandable chunks - in the space of one second, this fiber could transmit 22x more data than the global internet traffic from that same second.
Treon Verdery
What would you, the reader use this data bandwidth for? Reply!

Possible utilizations of this bandwidth are gathering all the data of 70-90 trillion body cytes and transmitting it to the computation/data cloud for processing. Transhumanists and any person that favors staying alive plural milleniums value backing up the entire state of the human body multiple ocurrences per second to recreate and/or restore living form.