Japanese researchers with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) are the first to transmit data at the mind-blowing speed of 1.02 petabits per second. Being that one petabit equates to one million gigabits, this level of speed is effectively 100,000 times greater than even the fastest internet speeds currently available to consumers. The achievement is also notable in that the researchers hit 1.02 Pb/s using standard optical fiber cables, which should be compatible with existing infrastructure. One petabit per second is equivalent to 10 million channels of 8K broadcasting per second, according to the NICT.
Researchers from the Network Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) report the world’s first demonstration of more than 1 petabit per second in a multi-core fiber (MCF) with a standard diameter of 0.125 mm. The researchers, led by Benjamin J. Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that supports a record optical bandwidth exceeding 20 THz by exploiting wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology. It incorporates the commercially adopted optical fiber transmission windows known as C and L-bands and extends the transmission bandwidth to include also the recently explored S-band.