Engineers Shatter Fiber Optic Speed Record at 22.9 Petabits Per Second
Share onThat's 20 times more bandwidth than the entire internet takes up.
There is enormous interest in space-based internet, but the web wouldn't work without its fiber optic backbone. These cables are ideal for shuffling large volumes of data around, and it's a relatively future-proof technology. Engineers in Japan have created a single fiber optic cable capable of transmitting data at an astonishing 22.9 petabits per second. That's about 20 times more than all global internet traffic collectively.
This record was set by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), and it's not the first time they have tinkered with ultra-fast fiber. The same team previously set a record with 10.66 petabits per second and has now doubled the ceiling with the new cable.
Most fiber optic cabling operating today has a bandwidth maximum of around 100 gigabits per second.
This far outstrips copper cables, most of which top out at several hundred megabits. However, some newer copper installations can manage a gigabit or more, even if ISPs rarely deliver that. That's why fiber has become the preferred way to build out wireline networks, and the NICT work shows this technology will probably be the best way to deliver connectivity for the foreseeable future.
The cable designed at NICT has the same components as standard fiber optics, but more cores are stacked tightly inside the sheath.
The current version has 38 cores inside, each transmitting between 0.3 and 0.7 petabits per second. To increase total bandwidth, the team utilized Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) and Space Division Multiplexed (SDM) data channels. Each core can operate in three modes, giving the cable 114 spatial channels. NICT says the complete cable has 293 wavelength channels in the S-band and 457 in the C and L-bands, which works out to a total frequency bandwidth of 18.8THz.
So, this proof-of-concept cable far surpasses current internet capacity, but we'll get there. And there's still room to grow, according to the NICT researchers. With some minor code tweaks, the team expects this cable can be boosted to 24.7 petabits per second. This approach could also be scaled to deliver even more bandwidth—internet traffic is predicted to increase by 1,000 times in the future, and this technology has the potential to keep up.