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Get ready for blazing fast internet, folks. But don’t rush; you have enough time to prepare for it. A team of researchers in Europe has developed a new way of transmitting data (opens in new tab) at speeds that dwarf the world’s fastest internet connections – and they’ve done it with just a simple chip and beam of light.
The team – made up of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden – designed a system that uses a photonic chip to split a light beam into more than 8,000 different color frequencies, isolating and using each color as a separate medium for carrying data.
The technology, which the researchers call a “frequency comb,” reached a staggering 1.8 petabits per second during testing. One petabit is equal to one million gigabit, or 125,000 gigabytes in practice. In other words, the experiment achieved an effective data transfer rate of 1,800,000,000 Mbps.
To put that in perspective, the average internet speed in Monaco (which will have the fastest internet in the world as of 2023) is 262 Mbps. That is only 0.0000146% of the speeds achieved by the Danish-Swedish team; the global average is even lower, at just 69.14 Mbps.
If you are lucky enough to work for NASAyou could take advantage of the space agency’s private shadow network “ESnet,” which is said to be capable of speeds of up to 91,000 Mbps — still a tiny fraction of the speed the frequency comb can achieve over less than a single square millimeter of optical cabling.
Analysis: This is seriously impressive, but don’t get too excited
Now petabit internet speeds have been achieved in the past; as reported by NewScientist (opens in new tab), the previous record for optical data transmission was actually 10.66 petabits per second, but that required a lot of bulky equipment. This new solution is much more compact, but more importantly scalable.
What that means is that the technology could potentially be scaled down to the size of a matchbox, and should theoretically be able to reach vastly faster speeds once the hardware is perfected.
Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen, one of the researchers, claimed: ‘Our calculations show that – with the single chip made by Chalmers University of Technology and a single laser – we can transmit up to 100 Pbit/s’. Let that sink in for a while.
Faster than speed
100 petabits per second is absolutely ridiculous internet speed. We mean ridiculous; we did some math on this to prove it. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most popular games on Steam right now, and it’s also one of the largest, with a hefty 120GB file size.
With a 100Pbit/s internet connection, you could download the entire game in about 9600 nanoseconds; less than a millisecond, just 0.0000096 seconds. That is wild – this writer lives in a fairly remote rural area with no fiber optic coverage, where it will take almost an afternoon to download a game like RDR2. Just imagining those kinds of internet speeds sends us into spasms of ecstasy.
Of course we won’t have 1000Pbit/s internet anytime soon. Everything else aside, your practical internet speed – i.e. how fast you can actually download stuff – will always be limited by the speed of your computer’s disk; if you’re still rocking a crusty old hard drive, you can’t expect transfer speeds in excess of 200MB/s. Even today’s fastest drives (PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs) top out at around 13,000 MB/s.
That’s an obstacle that will take a long time to overcome, but it’s not even the only problem. While Jørgensen and his team claim the technology is scalable and deployable, it would also require some degree of large-scale infrastructure development that simply isn’t happening fast enough. If it were, we’d all have NASA’s internet by now.