Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have made some important strides towards extremely fast internet connections. The team says they have achieved “unprecedented transmission capacity”, at a rate of one terabit-per-second.
Image: Shutterstock
The terabit milestone is almost the “theoretical maximum information transfer rate” on a fibre link, the team said. That’s pretty fast! It was achieved by adjusting the transmission rates so that it “dynamically adapted to channel conditions and traffic demands”. Instead of just a straight drag race to see how fast they could crank up the data transfer speeds, this approach seems to use a more intelligent process in order to achieve the terabit speed at a sustainable scale.
Just to put that in perspective, a 1Tb connection allows the transfer of 125 gigabytes-per-second. So, in theory, with a terabit connection you could download 25 five-gigabyte movies in a single second. Researchers have achieved these super-fast speeds before, but the breakthrough here is that these speeds were achieved on a real network, meaning its less theoretical and much more possible we could see it deployed in the real world.
Past milestones, like the 1.4Tb connection achieved in the UK a couple years ago, use multiple connections to achieve the blazingly fast speeds or happen in a controlled lab environment.
Terabit connections might not be coming to your house in the immediate future, but data service providers are going to need to cope with the eventual rollout of 5G wireless networks, which will allow smartphone users to use insane amounts of data. This breakthrough may help those data service providers dish out the massive amounts of bandwidth needed to service a 5G network.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo
Comments
16 responses to “A World With Terabit Internet Is Almost Here”
Must be a US article…
Cos they seem to believe the “world” begins and ends at their shores :’)
Don’t worry, I’m sure Malcolm will get the copper up to speed.
Well the “world” can have a terabit connection as long as it’s somewhere within the world…it didn’t say “worldwide”
C’mon mang…
And here I am…. Still waiting for NBN. :c
Terabit? Pfff the glorious speeds del
*buffering*
ivered by our copper network are more than adequate!
I read the title and immediately tried to calculate when said event would occur in Australia… I need far too much coffee to tackle these kind of deep thoughts so early.
PS – I cant upvote your comment enough @mrbs
Here’s my phone line on the next-gen nbn. It perfectly blends copper and optical networks:
http://img14.deviantart.net/d333/i/2011/180/6/a/glowing_filament_3_by_eanimusic-d3khj45.jpg
I do have to keep it away from the curtains, though.
An Australia with 97% NBN covered isn’t
But our government has insisted that 25M is all we will ever need, so surely these high speeds are unnecessary.
Worth noting this is for trunk lines which get multiplexed, it’s unlikely to ever be offered as a consumer option. That said, it would probably be pretty reasonable to see endpoint speeds of 5-10Gbps with this tech in place, assuming your service provider didn’t charge you through the nose for it.
How does this work with current HDD technology? Even an SSD doesn’t hit write speeds close to that right?
Wow, you could stream a hundred movies on that
LOL
Come here just to read the comments on how terrible Australia’s internet is.
Was not disappointed.
Don’t mind me though, I’ll go back to my 3mb/s speeds thanks to living in a suburb of Melbourne but too far from the nearest Exchange.