Terabits in thin fibre

We are all addicted to high-speed broadband. To have an uninterrupted flow in our consumption of online entertainment, gaming, social media, shopping, and work, we demand higher speeds on reliable networks.

While most of us have access to speeds of anywhere from 30 to 300 Mbps in most countries, researchers are privy to experimentation at the Tb/s level. Recently, a data transmission speed record was achieved at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) at 310 terabits per second! That’s enough to download 57,000 full-length movies in 1 second, much more than what is there on entire Netflix.

Data was looped through coiled bits of ‘an experimental strand of fiber optic cable with four cores housed in a cable roughly the size of a standard fiber optic line’ for a simulated transmission distance of 3001 km, without degradation of signal. https://buff.ly/3kCYi8V

This technology is called ‘wavelength-division multiplexing’. A laser splits signals into 552 channels, and beams it down four cores. Amplifiers laced with rare-earth minerals, thulium and erbium, help in boosting and generate incredible speeds.

The tech is expensive: it will be a while before we can lay our hands on it. Material Science in Magic.