An industry-academia team has sent data at a record rate of 402 terabits per second, or 402,000,000 megabits per second, using commercially available optical fibre.
The speed is over 100 million times faster than the internet connection speed recommendations of Netflix, of 3 Mbit/s or higher, for watching a HD movie.
The feat was achieved by using a wider spectrum, using six bands rather than the previous four, which increased capacity for data sharing. Normally just one or two bands are used.
The research was led by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Tokyo, and also included the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AIPT) in the UK, along with Nokia Bell Labs (USA) Amonics (Hong Kong), the University of Padova (Italy) and the University of Stuttgart.
Together they achieved the feat by constructing the first optical transmission system covering six wavelength bands (O, E, S, C, L and U) used in fibre optical communication.
Aston University contributed by building a set of U-band Raman amplifiers, the longest part of the combined wavelength spectrum, where conventional doped fibre amplifiers are not presently available from commercial sources.
As well as increasing capacity by approximately a third, the technique uses so-called ‘standard fibre’ that is already deployed in huge quantities worldwide, so there would be no need to install new specialist cables.
As demand for data from business and individuals increases this new discovery could help keep broadband prices stable despite an improvement in capacity and speed.
Aston University’s Dr Ian Philips said: “The newly developed technology is expected to make a significant contribution to expand the communication capacity of the optical communication infrastructure as future data services rapidly increase demand.”