Researchers at University College London have set an important new record in Internet history, reaching the speed of 178 terabits per second.
An important new chapter is added to the history of the Internet. To write it, are the researchers of University College London. In partnership with leading high-tech companies, scholars have set a new record for the speed of online data transmission. The incredible speed achieved by the team is 178 terabits per second (178 million megabits per second). To give an idea, with this connection a user could download the entire Netflix catalog in less than 1 second. The supremacy has been obtained by transmitting data through waves with an average length wider than the one used in the fiber optic connection. Previously, the data transmission speed record belonged to a Japanese team. The digital infrastructures that allowed the University College researchers to improve the Japanese result by 20% (marking a new record) were provided by the companies Xtera and KDDI Research. The results were published in the academic journal IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
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New Internet speed record
In the research abstract, the authors explain that “the maximum data rate in a singlemode optical fiber is a function of both signal bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio dependent on wavelength (SNR). In this article, we examine the use of discrete hybrid Raman amplifiers and rare earth fiber amplifiers to allow a wideband signal gain without spectral gaps between amplification bands. We describe the widest experimentally demonstrated continuous consistent transmission bandwidth to date of 16.83 THz, obtained using the S, C and L bands simultaneously. The variation of fiber parameters over this bandwidth, together with the hybrid amplification method, leads to a significant SNR wavelength dependency. To cope with this, the signal has been optimized for each SNR, wavelength and transmission band. Using a set of geometrically shaped constellations, the transmission of 660 × 25 GBd channels over 40 km is demonstrated, resulting in a record throughput of 178.08 Tbit/s single-mode fiber.
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