This speed puts everything that has gone before in the shade: Japanese researchers have transmitted data at 319 Tb/s via optical fibre. That is twice as fast as the previous record.

In Switzerland, when people talk about fast internet, they mean 1 or a maximum of 10 gigabits per second. Streaming in 4K or uploading large video files to YouTube is already pretty fast. What researchers in Japan have now shown, however, surpasses current speeds many times over.

According to their own information, they have set a new world record for internet speed. They were able to transmit data over a distance of 3001 kilometres at a speed of 319 terabits per second. This almost doubled the previous record of 178 Tb/s.

To put the value of 319 Tb/s into a size ratio, you have to divide it by eight. This gives 39.88 terabytes (TB), or 39,880 gigabytes per second. All the English-language articles on Wikipedia.com, 6,340,153 in all, are 78 gigabytes in size. With the new technology, all the texts of the online encyclopaedia could be transferred 511 times per second.

The product of data rate and distance is often used as a comparative value, according to a statement by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). In the test, the researchers achieved 957 petabits per second x km with the new method. One petabit per second corresponds to ten million transmissions in 8K resolution.

This is how the speed record came about

But how did the researchers manage to transmit the data at such a high speed? For one thing, they used a cable with four glass cores instead of just one. In addition, the data was transmitted with a technology called Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). In this process, the signal is split into 552 channels by a laser and then sent via the four fibre optic cores. In addition, the signal was again optically amplified.

According to Heise.de, it is crucial that the four-core cable has the same diameter as a conventional cable with one fibre. This means that the new technology could be used in the future without having to fundamentally adapt the existing infrastructure. The scientists now hope that their method will help to cope with the expected increase in data on the internet in the coming years. (MSN)