It is certain that the internet will be much faster in the future than we are used to. But we have plenty of time to prepare for this change. A research team in Europe has developed a new way of transmitting data at speeds that dwarf the fastest internet connections in the world, and they did so using just a simple chip and a beam of light.
The team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and the 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. Each color was isolated and used as a separate medium to carry data.
The technology, which the researchers call a “frequency comb,” achieved an impressive speed of 1.8 petabits per second in tests. One petabit is equal to one million gigabits or 125,000 gigabytes. In other words, the experiment achieved an effective data transfer rate of 1,800,000,000 Mbps.
Victor Torres Company, head of the research group that developed the chip and professor at Chalmers University of Technology, said in a statement: “The peculiarity of this chip is that it produces a frequency comb with ideal properties for fiber optic communications – it has high optical power and a wide bandwidth within the spectral region, which is interesting for advanced optical communications. “In fact, some characteristic parameters were obtained by chance and not by design. However, with the efforts of my team, we are now able to reverse the process and achieve highly repeatable micro honeycombs for target applications in telecommunications.”
Just as the capacity of a highway can be expanded by adding more lanes, internet speeds can be increased by adding more cables to transmit data. However, this is not a cost-effective method to increase the capacity of the internet. Researchers are exploring ways to improve the way existing infrastructure moves data more efficiently, making the latest record-breaking research even more impressive.
For comparison, the average internet speed in Monaco, which has the fastest internet in the world as of 2023, is 262 Mbps. That’s just 0.0000146% of the speeds achieved by the Denmark-Sweden team. The global average internet speed is much less at just 69.14 Mbps.
If you’re lucky enough to work for NASA, you can take advantage of the space agency’s private shadow network “ESnet,” which is reportedly capable of reaching speeds of up to 91,000 Mbps. But even this speed is only a fraction of what the frequency comb can achieve with less than a single square millimeter of optical cable.
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