An international team of researchers from Japan, the USA and France has managed to achieve a world record data transmission speed of 1 Petabit per second (or 1,000,000 Gigabits) in a single-core multi-mode optical fibre cable, which is 2.5 times faster than the previous record of 0.4Pbps.

The group of researchers involved in this demonstration came from the Network System Research Institute of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan), led by Georg Rademacher, NOKIA Bell Labs (Bell Labs, USA), led by Nicolas K. Fontaine, and Prysimian Group (France), led by Pierre Sillard.

The previous record was set at a speed of 0.4Pbps in a 10 mode multi-mode fibre, while this one managed to demonstrate the possibility of combining highly spectral efficient wideband optical transmission with an optical fibre guiding 15 fibre modes that had a cladding diameter in agreement with the current industry standard of 0.125mm (the coating diameter of 0.245mm was also fairly standard).

Unlike single-mode fibres, multi-mode cables tend to be designed more for shorter distances and indeed the latest test took place over 23km. One key advantage here, other than the breath-taking speed, is that you could make this cable using a similar manufacturing process to standard multi-mode fibres. Mind you, building a cost-effective digital signal processor that is fast enough to keep up with such data flow is another challenge.

When increasing the number of modes in a multi-mode fiber transmission system, the computational complexity of the required MIMO digital signal processing increases. However, the used transmission fiber had a small modal delay, simplifying the MIMO complexity and maintained this low modal delay over a large optical bandwidth. As a result, we could demonstrate the transmission of 382 wavelength channels, each modulated with 64-QAM signals.

The success of large-capacity transmission using a single-core multimode optical fiber, which has a high spatial signal density and easy manufacturing technology, is expected to advance high-capacity multimode transmission technology for future high capacity optical transmission systems.

Further details of the test can be found in this research paper. In the future, the team plans to work on extending the distance of large-capacity multi-mode transmission and integrating it with multi-core technology to establish the foundation of future optical transmission technology with large capacity.

Correct me if I’m wrong, does that equate to roughly 120 terabytes a second download speed lol?

Networks generally measure transfer speed using bits, rather than bytes. So 1 Petabit per second is 1,000 Terabits p/s or 1,000,000 Gigabits p/s. As a Terabyte p/s it would be 125 but, as I say, people usually use bits for transfer speeds.

While this news story is interesting to the average UK broadband user it’s not much of a relevance. In fact, the vast majority in this country doesn’t even have regular fibre broadband in the first place!

What a strange comment. I mean obviously it’s for backhaul by ISPs and large networks not exactly gonna be for home use is it.

Is this really multimode in the “old” sense of the word Mark?