Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT) research group has managed to break the internet speed record achieving a total of 319 Terabits per second at 3,000 km — doubling the previous world record.
The previous record was set at 178 Terabits per second. It was achieved in 2020, and was made possible by a collaboration between Japanese and UK engineers.
Well, now the Japanese have managed to set a new record at an impressive 319 Terabits per second, an impressive figure that leaves us with a bandwidth of 39.87 Terabytes per second. With 319 Tbps, it would be possible to download 10,000 high definition movies of about 4 GB each in just one second.
To achieve this new record, NICT engineers used a new fiber optic cable technology in the form of small tubes that transmit information through light. The team had to use major add-ons and worked with lasers to demonstrate, in short, that they could ‘create recirculating transmission on 552 x 25 GHz spaced channels covering less than 120 nm in the S, C and L bands on a fiber of 4 cores of 125 µm in diameter, and achieve a decoded performance of 319 Terabits per second in 3,001 km.
The laser technology they used works on 552 channels and fires at various wavelengths. These light streams are then processed and amplified by new types of fiber amplifiers that were previously enhanced with thulium and erbium. The subsequent process is what is known as regular Raman amplification.
NICT believes that these new fiber optic cables could be adapted “easily” to existing infrastructures, so there would be no major changes to the components that make up the data core networks and, consequently, would facilitate their adoption. In practical terms, this technology would be ideal to drive the development of next-generation communication technologies “beyond 5G (such as 6G) that will offer high internet speed.
