You might think you have a fast internet speed. But no matter how fast it is, it’s sluggish compared to the astoundingly rapid speed achieved by an international team led by Japanese researchers: 1.02 petabits per second over 1,808 kilometers. This is—easily—a world record for transmission speed over the internet.
This internet speed is fast enough to download years of songs or videos in a single second. Or to back up the contents of an extensive corporate archive before you’re done with your morning coffee.
In numerical terms, the median high speed broadband download speed in the U.S. is 290 Mbps (not as fast as Singapore’s 372 Mbps but faster than Romania’s 254 Mbps). The research team’s new world record of 1.02 petabits per second is over 3.5 million times faster.
The feat was accomplished by a truly international research team. It was led by experts at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), along with researchers from universities in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sumitomo Electric in Japan.
To achieve their speed, the team did not require special fiber networking. They used 19-core optical fiber, which is the fastest fiber currently available. The fiber had the commonly used 0.125 mm cladding, which is widely used in commercial networks.
The team’s core innovation was not larger fiber, but a technique that sent 19 fully distinct data-bearing light transmissions through a network fiber that usually carries a single light transmission. To test whether this transmission speed could be maintained across longer distances, researchers looped the signal 21 times across 86.1 kilometer distances of optical fiber.
They also used signal amplifiers to enhance the signal speed at every pass. The signal boosters had to be meticulously tuned to speed signal across the C and the L wavelengths for 19 transmission. The test was capable of sending its massive volumes of data streams by using 180 wavelengths modulated by 16-QAM, which is a modulation technique in which the carrier can exist in one of sixteen different states.
In short, incorporating this level of advanced physics is far from today’s real-world networks. For instance, fiber optics forms the backbone of the internet but is not yet used throughout the internet. While fiber carries much of the signal in developed countries, Web data transmission in some instances must travel through slow copper cables for the so-called “last mile” of the internet.
Still, the research team’s advance offers a glimpse of what is possible. Transmission speeds at this pace would completely revolutionize cloud computing, enabling users to access the menu of cloud-based software at vastly faster speeds. Today’s AI workloads would be enormously more powerful if geographically distant data sources could be combined at such a rapid rate. For the consumer market, video conferencing would offer a much clearer signal and exponentially greater reliability.
