New world record for Internet speed with 178 Tb / s (terabits per second)

The researchers achieved a connection speed of 178 Tb / s (terabits per second), which is 17800 times higher than the fastest commercially available connection in the world.

ΠIt has been a long time since we saw a remarkable speed record Internet, but this time we could not pass up the achievement of a group of researchers UCL (University College London), Xtera and KDDI Research (the research center of the telecommunications provider of Japan).

What did the researchers achieve? They succeeded connection speed 178 Tb / s (terabits per second), which is 17800 times higher than the fastest commercially available connection in the world (10Gb / s in some parts of Japan, the USA and New Zealand). Not even that ESnet of NASA can not approach this speed (400 Gb / s). In practice, if we could take advantage of this connection it would be possible download all of Netflix in less than 1 second!

On the technical side, researchers have developed new ways of managing light before it passes through the optical fibers and have actually managed to fit much more information into existing networks. They also point out that most networks now offer bandwidth of up to 4.5 THz, some up to 9 THz, but in the UCL / Xtera / KDDI system reached up to 16.8 THz.

This extra bandwidth was created using Geometric Shaping Patterns which change the phase, brightness and polarization of the wavelength in order to fit more information without affecting one wave to another. It is worth noting that they have combined various existing signal amplification technologies into their hybrid system.

Although these speeds rarely go beyond research, in this case it is very positive that the system can be applied to existing fiber optic networks without much difficulty. Instead of replacing thousands of kilometers of fiber, all that is needed is to upgrade the signal amplifiers that are installed every 40-100km.

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