Engineers in Japan have broken data transmission speed records, with the team successfully transmitting more than 20 times the amount of global Internet traffic per second through a single optical fiber. If you're one of the lucky few connected to one of the fastest consumer internet connections in the world, you'll have 10Gbps broadband installed in your home. A small number of people are using 1Gbps connections, and the average person can usually afford only a few hundred Mbps.
But now, Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has achieved an absolutely insane data transfer rate of 22.9 Petabits per second. To put that into perspective, that's enough speed to carry the entire Internet's traffic 22 times per second and still have bandwidth to spare. Even NASA's current capabilities can only transmit 0.046Pb/s.
To reach this milestone, NICT leveraged a number of emerging technologies. Instead of just one core for transmitting data, the cable contains 38 cores, each of which can transmit data in three modes, for a total of 114 spatial channels.
Each mode in each spatial channel consists of 750 wavelength channels in three bands (S, C and L) with a bandwidth of 18.8THz.
The rate of 22.9Pb/s is more than double the previous record set in 2020. The research team said that by optimizing the error correction function, the peak speed of the system can reach 24.7Pb/s.
Don't expect to be able to stream all of Netflix's content in a fraction of a second in the near future, though; this data decoding technique involves complex signal processing and requires specialized equipment called MIMO receivers installed throughout the network. In the short term, a quad-core version with each core transmitting data in only one mode could be compatible with existing infrastructure and still achieve data transfer speeds of over 1Pb per second.
The research results were presented at the European Optical Communications Conference in Scotland in October.