It seems that there are still many breakthroughs in terms of internet speed, because we just wrote about the previous record, and this one is already out of date.
In March this year, Nokia Bell Labs announced its record speed result of 1.52 Tbps over a distance of 80 kilometers, which then seemed impossible to us, but ... literally 2 months passed and was beaten. In May, Australian scientists from Monash University, Swinburne University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Melbourne (RMIT), using 75 kilometers of fiber optic cable and one transmission source, achieved a speed of 44.2 terabits per second, i.e. allowing 1000 HD movies to be downloaded literally in a split second. What is equally important, they used the existing, only slightly modified, infrastructure, so the possible implementation of the "new" Internet would be much easier.
But guess what? This is also a thing of the past, although the innovative device called a micro-comb, which is compatible with the current networks, which is able to replace as many as 80 lasers used so far, will certainly find its application. Nevertheless, the current internet speed record is already 178 terabits per second, which means that you can literally download the entire Netflix library in less than a second! This is 17.8 times more than the fastest Internet connection available to customers, i.e. 10 Gb / s, and even NASA must be satisfied with literally a substitute for this speed, i.e. 400 Gb / s. It cannot be denied that the latest record left far behind the aforementioned experimental methods and the only question is how quickly it will be beaten again.
The breakthrough was made by scientists from University College London (UCL), Xtera and KDDI Research, who previously signaled that they were able to reach 150 Tb / s, and have now refined the method and boosted the speed by nearly 20% to 178 Tb / s. How can we learn from them: - Although the current technology of connections in cloud data centers allows to transport at speeds of up to 35 terabits per second, we are working on new technologies that are to improve the efficiency of the existing infrastructure and allowed to achieve a record speed of 178 terabits per second - he explains the researcher, Lidia Galdino. We are talking here, for example, about increasing the frequency from the typical 4.5 THz to 16.8 THz, which in turn gives you room to think about new geometrically shaped constellations, i.e. signal combinations that allow you to modify the phase, brightness and polarization of the wavelength to push to light more information than before. The best news is probably the fact that the technology can be used in existing fiber networks, which, as we wrote earlier, is invaluable in the context of the speed of implementing new solutions - in this case, instead of replacing miles of cables, it is enough to modify signal amplifiers spaced every 40-100 kilometers.