- Future networks could transport petabit speeds without new cable forms
- Standard diameter fibers take an important new step in the laboratory test
- The average internet speed of the United States is overshadowed by revolutionary optical transmission
Burial in the streets of the city, the country roads and the bottom of the deep ocean are the glass threads which transport almost everything we do online.
These strands, often not wider than a human hair, already move from amazing amounts of data, and now, Japanese researchers have further pushed these limits – without changing the shape or size of the cable.
A team led by the National Institute of Japan of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT), working with Sumitomo Electric and European Collarators, reached a transmission speed of 1.02 petabits per second over 1,808 kilometers.
A new world record
The test used an optical fiber with 19 cores with a standard coating diameter of 0.125 mm, which means that it is the same thickness as the monocœur fibers already deployed in networks from around the world.
Instead of requiring entirely new infrastructure, the 19 -lane separate light cables in the space generally used for one.
This allows a spectacular jump in capacity while remaining compatible with existing systems.
It also marks the first time that a Petabit class signal has traveled more than 1,000 kilometers in a standard fiber.
The result establishes a new world record for the capacity product of capacity to 1.86 exabilities per second kilometer.
To simulate a long -distance backbone, the signals were completed 21 times 86.1 km from the new fiber. The amplifiers increased the signal to each pass and were carefully set to operate through the wavelength C and L strips for the 19 cores.
Using 180 modulated wavelengths with 16qam, the system was able to manage huge volumes of parallel data flows.
After traveling the simulated route, the signals were separated by a multichannel receiver using the processing of the MIMO digital signal.
This has avoided adding more fiber nuclei or widening the diameter of the cable, which would have made integration with current networks harder.
To put the new success in its context, the average speed with large American strip at the beginning of 2025 is around 290 Mbps. The new record of 1.02 petabes per second is equivalent to 1,020,000 Mbps – more than 3.5 million times faster.
The results were presented to the OFC 2025 as a document after the Diadline, offering an overview of what could be like future optical networks.
Although it does not transform the work or domestic connections overnight, research shows how standard fibers can still go. The team now aims to refine the efficiency of the amplifier and the processing of the signal to get closer to the deployment of the real world.
Global data traffic that continues to grow, progress like this one offers a way to stretch the infrastructure more without the need to widen new trenches.
