Japanese again broke the record of the fastest optical fiber in the world!
A staggering number
At the beginning of the summer , we informed you that Japanese scientists managed to break the record for data transfer speed with optical fibers , transmitting 1.02 petabit per second over 51.7 kilometers. Now, the bar has just been raised even higher!
Once again, the impressive achievement belongs to the team of researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) who achieved a bandwidth of about 1.53 petabits per second by encoding information in 55 different frequencies of light (a technique known as multiplexing).
According to Internet Live Stats, this is more data than goes through the entire internet every second! Yes, it’s a number that’s really hard to keep in mind, and it means that this bandwidth can carry the entire world’s internet traffic through a single fiber optic cable!
Imagine that to reach one gigabit, you need 1,000 megabits, a speed that exceeds more than 20 times the average internet speed in Greece. Then, to reach 1 petabit one needs… 1 million gigabits! In case you need a little more context to grasp the feat, 1 petabyte of data per second is equivalent to 127,500 GB per second. As the researchers point out, this speed is enough to stream 8K video content from 10 million channels simultaneously.
As for their technology, it takes advantage of the different frequencies of light available across the spectrum. Since each “color” of visible and invisible light has its own unique frequency, it can also carry its own independent stream of information. The researchers were therefore able to achieve a spectral efficiency of 332 bits/s/Hz (bits per second per Hz).
For the record, the data transfer speed record is 1.8 petabits per second and was achieved in October, but not over fiber optic cable. On the contrary, for this record another scientific team from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden had used special lasers.
