Some operators are offering up to a “giga” of speed, that is, 1 Gbps, establishing itself as the object of desire for those who want to have the fastest connection at home. But there is an informal competition between different universities that, year after year, carry out different experiments to squeeze fiber optics to their maximum speed.
Throughout 2021, different teams have tried to beat the 178 Tbps record held by University College London since 2020. No one had been able to send data faster over a fiber cable than these scientists… until the summer of 2021 in the one that a team from Japan beat this mark and, moreover, not by a few tenths, practically doubling it.
The highest fiber speed: 319 Tbps
Specifically, it was the researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology of Japan, known by its acronym NICT, who raised the bar to 319 Tbps of data speed at a distance of 3,001 km.
Benjamin Puttnam, who is responsible, and his team built a transmission system using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology by combining different amplification technologies.
In this demonstration, in addition to the C and L bands, usually used for long-distance transmission at high data rates, the team also used the transmission bandwidth of the S band, which they said had not been used. above for a transmission beyond a single span. The combined transmission bandwidth of over 120nm enabled the multiplexing of 552 wavelength channels by adopting two types of doped fiber amplifiers together with distributed Raman amplification, to enable recirculating transmission of the broadband signal. wide.
The best thing about this experiment, beyond all this technical verbiage, is that it used “normal” four-core fiber-optic cables with standard sheathing. Something that allows it to be used with any commercial network equipment at the moment. We are not talking about the “routers” of the houses, but the antennas and data processing centers that could take advantage of this technology for the deployment of new services such as support for 5G and others.