Scientists and engineers have been working endlessly to innovate and come up with new ways to transfer data at even faster speeds. We thought that there wouldn’t be anything faster than today’s fiber optics but it seems that science has proved us wrong yet again. The world record for fastest internet speed has just been broken by a landslide by Japanese engineers that showed off their fiber optics with speeds over 300 terabits per second.
The world record for fastest internet speed broke when Japanese engineers showed off a transmission rate of 319 terabits per second, over more than 3,000 km of fibers. For comparison purposes, the last record was around 178 terabits per second. Meaning the new record is almost double that. The record before that was 44.2 terabit per second so you can guess just how quickly we’re innovating our technology.
The Japanese engineers were using regular fiber optics albeit with a few gimmicks and improvements added on top. For one, they made use of four cores rather than a single core found in traditional fiber optics. Cores are the glass tubes found inside optic fiber cables that carry the light signal forward by reflecting it. The signals are broken into multiple wavelengths transmitted simultaneously, using a technique called wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).
The optics also included a third band so that more data could be carried. They extended the fiber wire’s distance using various enhancers and optical amplification technologies. Overall, the system makes use of something called a comb laser that can generate light at 552 channels and different wavelengths. this light is then run through dual-polarization modulation, delaying some wavelengths to create different signal sequences. Each of these signal sequences is then fed into one of the four cores of the optical fiber.
You can read more about how the system works by reading the original paper that was submitted at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications. So what this means is that we might be seeing improvements in data transmission technologies in the years to come. Wireless data transmission is already seeing a big bump in performance with 5G and it’s only going to improve from here.
Imagine how fast you could download Warzone at 318 terabits per second. You wouldn’t even need to blink.
