A team of scientists from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has set a new speed record for data transmission using fiber optic cables described as infrastructure compatible existing.
A vertiginous flow
As a reminder, 1 petabit equivalent to one million gigabits, which means that the speed achieved for this new record is regarding 100,000 times higher than those currently available to individuals in the best served regions of the world. Even theUS Space Agency won’t get what » 400 Gb/s when its network ESnet6 will be deployed in 2023. According to the Japanese team, at speeds of 1 Pb/s, one might theoretically simultaneously broadcast 10 million video streams with 8K resolution.
Presented on the occasion of theInternational Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics 2022, this new record involved the use of several emerging technologies. The optical fiber used had four cores (the glass tubes that transmit signals) instead of the usual one, while the transmission bandwidth was boosted to an all-time high of 20 THz, thanks to a technology called D-Division Multiplexing. wavelength (WDM).
This bandwidth consists of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread over three bands: the commonly used C and L bands, as well as the experimental S band. signal, the team reached the record speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km of fiber optic cables.
Big advantages
This is not the first time that scientists from NTIC exceed the petabit threshold for data transmission. By December 2020, the team had set a record of 1.01 Pb/s, using single-core fiber optic cable and 15″ encoded data. modes ».
However, as impressive as this feat was, it required complex signal processing to decode the data, which meant that specialized integrated circuits would have to be developed and deployed for such technology to ever be used on a large scale.
The new approach is not only faster, but also has the advantage of transmitting data in only one mode per core, which can be read by current systems. Best of all, since the quad-core fiber optic cable has the same diameter as a standard cable (0.125mm), it should be compatible with existing infrastructure and manufacturing processes.
