Researchers at the University College London have achieved a breakthrough in internet data transfer speeds. Using fiber optic technology, they achieved a speed of 1.125 Tb/s (Terabits). To achieve this, the scientists used a series of signal processing techniques. To put this into something you can wrap your head around, Dr. Robert Maher stated this in a press release:
“For comparison this is almost 50,000 times greater than the average speed of a UK broadband connection of 24 megabits per second… To give an example, the data rate we have achieved would allow the entire HD Game of Thrones series to be downloaded within one second. Using high-bandwidth super-receivers enables us to receive an entire super-channel in one go… However, using a single receiver varies the levels of performance of each optical sub-channel so we had to finely optimize both the modulation format and code rate for each optical channel individually to maximize the net information data rate. This ultimately resulted in us achieving the greatest information rate ever recorded using a single receiver.”
Before we get too excited about the possibility of this making it into our daily lives, in these experiments, the team directly connected the transmitter to the receiver. The next step is that they’ll have to link the two using optical fibers, which will cause the signal to become distorted as it travels down the line, which means that the transfer rate would reduce as the signal becomes more and more distorted so these amazing benchmarks won’t be the final numbers.
One can only dream, though!
