Set a new record for data transfer rates: 319 Tbps over fiber

Japanese engineers demonstrated data transmission at a speed of 319 terabits per second (TB/s) over fiber optic cables. A new world record has been set on over 3,000 km of fiber.

The new record is almost double the previous one – last year the data transfer rate reached 178 TB / s. At the same time, NASA manages the speed of “only” 400 Gbps, and this completely negates the speeds currently available to consumers. The fastest home Internet connections in parts of Japan, New Zealand, and the United States are known to only reach a maximum speed of 10 Gbps.

Researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology have made a breakthrough by modernizing existing fiber-optic infrastructure and applying new signaling technology. They used four-core cables instead of the standard single-core cables and split each signal into multiple wavelengths transmitted simultaneously.

Unlike the standard transmission scheme, when only one core is used to transmit information, the technology implies the simultaneous use of 4 cores at once. The original signal is transmitted in parts using wavelength division multiplexing. The engineers also provided for the addition of a “third band” and equipment for optical amplification of signals for the greatest possible transmission distance. The transmitting device is a laser that forms 522 channels of different wavelengths. Then, the signal is modulated, processed, and fed into the line. Free News