In the era we are living, can we consider a slow internet connection? We are living in a world where social connectivity is considered as an essential requirement for each and every person.
From virtual assistants to IoT devices, the Internet is a basic requirement and frankly, slow internet connection is a curse in today’s era.
Researchers at the University College London have set a new world record for the fastest internet in the world at 178 terabits per second or 178,000 Gbps. The project was conducted by the Royal Academy of Engineering Researcher Dr. Lidia Galdino and Xtera and Kiddi Research.
This could be more than just a super-fast lab experiment too – the technology used to reach the 178 Tbps record can be added to existing optical fiber pipes relatively easily, according to the scientists behind the project.
With 4K movies about 15GB in size, you could download about 1,500 of them in a single second at the new speed.
Lead author Dr Galdino, a Lecturer at UCL and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, said: “While current state-of-the-art cloud data-centre interconnections are capable of transporting up to 35 terabits a second, we are working with new technologies that utilise more efficiently the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fibre bandwidth and enabling a world record transmission rate of 178 terabits a second.”
Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, demand for broadband communication services has soared, with some operators experiencing as much as a 60% increase in internet traffic compared to before the crisis. In this unprecedented situation, the resilience and capability of broadband networks has become even more critical.
Dr Galdino added: “But, independent of the Covid-19 crisis, internet traffic has increased exponentially over the last 10 years and this whole growth in data demand is related to the cost per bit going down. The development of new technologies is crucial to maintaining this trend towards lower costs while meeting future data rate demands that will continue to increase, with as yet unthought-of applications that will transform people’s lives.”
To do this, researchers combined different amplifier technologies needed to boost the signal power over this wider bandwidth and maximised speed by developing new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations (patterns of signal combinations that make best use of the phase, brightness and polarisation properties of the light), manipulating the properties of each individual wavelength. The achievement is described in a new paper in IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
The new record, demonstrated in a UCL lab, is a fifth faster than the previous world record held by a team in Japan.
