Japan Sets New World Record for Petabit Data Transmission Per Second

With the world becoming more connected and the need for information being more urgent than ever, there is a massive push to make our devices faster and support them with an unprecedented data transmission backbone.

Earlier this year, reports came out on how 10Gbps internet connections are nearing reality, and now researchers in Japan have demonstrated petabit data transmission.

Petabit (PB) refers to the unit of data, and 1 PB is equivalent to 1,000,000 Gigabytes (GB). The new record could usher in new home internet speeds that are 100,000 times faster than any of the current fastest services on the market.

With this power, 1 petabit per second would mean 10 million channels of 8K broadcasting per second, making live coverage easily achievable from all corners of the world with virtually no lapse.

The world of communications made a giant leap when we moved away from copper cables to optical fibers. The speed of data transmission increased manifold, and it is the very infrastructure that lets you make high-quality video calls and watch movies in 4K resolution.

With 1.02 PB traveling over 32 miles per second, we could soon send 127,500 GB of data every second.

In the laboratory, though, researchers are working on advanced optical fiber cables that appear like the one that runs to your house but can support multiple propagation paths on the inside. One such method involves using different modes of transmission inside a single core, TechXplore reported.

In December 2020, researchers at NICT demonstrated petabit transmission of data using 15 modes in a single core. However, to make this transmission work efficiently, one also needs signal processing to work in a MIMO (Multiple-input-multiple-output) fashion. What that means is that the signals are scrambled as they travel through the core and now need to be unscrambled by specialized equipment when received. This requires the use of dedicated integrated circuits and practical deployment of this technology is difficult until we develop the circuits at scale.

The other option is to transmit signals in a single mode but pack more cores in an optical fiber. The result is multiple transmission paths of data to be sent across an optical fiber that looks no different from the outside but on the inside is carrying millions of bits of data through them. Since the manufacturing of these cables is not very different from that of single-core cables, it is easier to bring them to a commercial reality.

The researchers at NICT utilized wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), where signals of different wavelengths are sent over the same medium. This allows for more data to be transmitted at the same time through the same cable. This technology has been exploited commercially and operators of optical fiber cables used the C and L bands to send across their data.

Along with using these two bands, the researchers at NICT also included the recently explored S-band during their test transmission. Using custom amplifiers for these bands, the researchers managed to send across 801 wavelengths and achieved a record 20 THz optical bandwidth in a multi-core fiber, the press release said. The entire system transmitted data at the rate of 1.02 petabit per second over a distance of 31.68 miles (51 km).

As the world embraces 5G, there is expected to be an explosion of amounts of data that will need to be transmitted, and technologies like these can ensure that the transition can happen effortlessly.

The researchers presented their work at the International Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2022.