Holy Crap – 100 Terabyte Broadband [Gulp]

Okay this isn’t something we are going to see happening tomorrow, especially if you live the US and Canada with their increasing draconian attitudes about users getting the best broadband experience at a reasonable price, but New Scientist is reporting that NEC scientists have achieved 101.7 Tbs speeds.

They did this by cramming the light from 370 lasers into 165 kilometers of fiber, only to be out done by NICT researchers who achieved 109 Tbps by using a special fiber with seven cores.

At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference in Los Angeles last month, Dayou Qian, also of NEC, reported a total data-sending rate of 101.7 terabits per second through 165 kilometres of fibre. He did this by squeezing light pulses from 370 separate lasers into the pulse received by the receiver. Each laser emitted its own narrow sliver of the infrared spectrum, and each contained several polarities, phases and amplitudes of light waves to code each packet of information.

At the same conference, Jun Sakaguchi of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo also reported reaching the 100-terabit benchmark, this time using a different method. Instead of using a fibre with only one light-guiding core, as happens now, Sakaguchi’s team developed a fibre with seven. Each core carried 15.6 terabits per second, yielding a total of 109 terabits per second. “We introduced a new dimension, spatial multiplication, to increasing transmission capacity,” Sakaguchi says.

Oh to dream of the day. SIGH