The fastest internet speed in the world has been clocked at an incredible 178 terabits per second (Tb/s) – fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in under a second. Engineers in the UK and Japan have developed new ways to modulate light before it’s beamed down optical fibers, allowing for much wider bandwidths than usual.
That new top speed is an insane feat. It’s 17,800 times faster than the current fastest internet connections available to consumers – 10 Gb/s in parts of places like Japan, the US and New Zealand. Even NASA can’t compete, with its 400 Gb/s ESnet.
It also leaves other experimental devices in the dust, including a photonic chip developed in Australia that clocked a still-impressive 44 Tb/s just a few months ago, and beats the previous record holder – a Japanese team with 150 Tb/s – by almost 20 percent.
“While current state-of-the-art cloud data-centre interconnections are capable of transporting up to 35 terabits a second, we are working with new technologies that utilize more efficiently the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fiber bandwidth and enabling a world record transmission rate of 178 terabits a second,” says Lidia Galdino, lead researcher on the study.
To hit these speeds, engineers at University College London (UCL), Xtera and KDDI Research developed new technologies to essentially squeeze more information through the existing fiber optic infrastructure. Most are currently capable of a bandwidth of up to 4.5 THz, with some new technologies approaching 9 THz. The team’s new system, however, raises the bar to 16.8 THz.
To get this much extra “room,” the researchers develop new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations. Basically, these are patterns of signal combinations that alter the phase, brightness and polarization of the wavelengths, in order to fit more information into light without the wavelengths interfering with each other. This was done by combining different existing amplifier technologies into a hybrid system.
Perhaps the best news is that because it uses the fiber optic cables already in place in many parts of the world, this technology could be integrated into existing infrastructure relatively easily. Instead of replacing miles and miles of cable, it would only require upgrades to the amplifiers, which appear every 40 to 100 km (25 to 62 mi) or so.
The research was published in the journal IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
Source: UCL
and still nothing worth watching.....
They use the wavelength to multiplex and send multiple "channels" on one fibre. Then at some point, you send more than a programmable chip can intercept - it can just execute at 3GHz clock cycles - but a prism or mirror runs faster. So many runs at the same time and individual "channels" cannot be intercepted. The fibre is put in the ground and tuned to compensate for variation in density when it was produced.
The same fibre runs the same distance, not quite from USA to China, but it is hundreds of km/miles. The light is one beam, and we see the wavelength as the different colours. If a hundred people can share the same fibre at the same speed, the cost of pulling the fibre is shared by everyone.
Europe knew that the speed of light was the same for everyone - socialistic and shared. So they made standards for multiplexing on the fibre and has for decades helped China and everyone to develop this technology. I had some consultants working on "inference" between the channels some years ago, they wanted this in-between channels to be used for "my turn/ your turn" kind of information.
These fibres run the internet outside the USA and is used worldwide for mobile phones. These are the international standards that the FCC will not approve of because they want to secure a place for a US company to "discover" it and "patent" the "technology" so that everybody can pay to the FCC for isolating America.
What none of you detected is that at 3000GHz, the light travels less than an inch, about 1/10 of a millimetre and that is very difficult to make a circuit with programmable circuits this small. The ITU assumes that 4KBytes are collected and routed per slot that then can be routed as those that have configured the fibre wants the 4K "packets" delivered. This is an "increment" or "decrement" on your mobile phone bill. What is described here is that STM1000 is possible, and even above this. This means that the operators that have pulled the fibre can by adding ITU equipment, put 1000 more on the same fibre and get paid many times over for sharing the bandwith - every one of the hundreds gets their own private fibre capacity, uplink and downlink can be 2 separate channels.
This is politically motivated, and not limited by physics. The light runs socialistically just as fast for everyone and can be shared.