Breakthrough in fiber optic technology transmitting data at record speeds of up to 402 Tbps

A group of scientists at Aston University (UK) has just made a breakthrough in the field of communications by achieving data transmission speeds using fiber optic cables of up to 402 Tbps, about 1.6 million times faster than current home Internet connections.

This achievement opens up limitless possibilities for transmitting large amounts of data, from smooth 8K video playback to complex virtual reality applications. However, scientists still have many challenges to overcome to put this technology into practical applications.

To achieve this impressive speed, scientists exploited all the wavelengths used in commercial fiber optic technology instead of just one or two wavelengths as is currently the case. The results of this research were published in a technical report by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

The new record for data transmission speed using fiber optic technology is estimated to be 25 percent faster than the previous record set by the same group of scientists in March. In previous experiments, they achieved a speed of 301 Tbps using four of the six wavelengths in the fiber optic cable.

“This discovery could increase the capacity of a single fibre optic cable, leading to a more efficient system,” Ian Phillips, a lecturer in electronics and computer engineering at Aston University, said in a statement. “The newly developed technology is expected to make a significant contribution to expanding the communication capacity of optical communications infrastructure as the demand for future data services rapidly increases.”

To achieve this new record, the team built the world's first optical transmission system spanning all six wavelengths used in fiber optic communications, including 0-band (wavelength 1,260-1,360 nm), E-band (wavelength 1,360-1,460 nm), S-band (wavelength 1,460-1,530 nm), C-band (wavelength 1,530-1,565 nm), L-band (wavelength 1,565-1,625 nm) and U-band (wavelength 1,625-1,675 nm).

Most current commercial fiber optic connections transmit data using the C and L bands, which have wavelengths between 1,530 nm and 1,625 nm, because they are the bands that allow for the most stable data transmission, meaning the least amount of data is lost during transmission, the scientists report. However, as the demand for data transmission increases, these bands are no longer able to meet the demand, meaning new bands need to be used.

The important thing about this breakthrough research is that the scientists achieved a record speed of 402 Tbps on standard commercial optical fibers, meaning there was no need to use specialized optical fibers.

Today, fiber optic technology is used in all high-speed broadband connections, working by reflecting light beams along the inside of glass fibers. Compared to the copper cables that were previously common, fiber optic cables provide faster data transmission speeds, are less susceptible to data loss, and can transmit large amounts of data at once.

One of the biggest advantages of fiber optic cables is that light can travel through them at many different wavelengths. Signals transmitted at different bands in the infrared spectrum do not interfere with each other as they travel through the cable. This means that fiber optic cables can carry multiple signals at the same time, greatly increasing the amount of data that can be transmitted at any given time.

Multinational media and streaming service Netflix recommends users have a minimum bandwidth of 3 Megabits per second (Mbps) to stream high-definition content without interruption. The speed achieved by the researchers in this test is 100 million times faster than the speed recommended by Netflix.

Meanwhile, according to a study by Deloitte, a household of five may need no more than 50 Mbps of bandwidth. Even a household of four, with three people streaming 4K video and downloading content at the same time, would only need a little over 314 Mbps of bandwidth.

Thus, at the speeds achieved in this study, data from millions of households could be transmitted over a single fiber optic cable without any delay.