Researchers have claimed to have broken a speed record for the fastest internet speed ever recorded, fast enough to download 1,000 movies in under a second.
The researchers from RMIT, Monash and Swinburne universities in Australia allegedly clocked in a speed of 44.2 terabits per second, completely
dwarfing the global internet average of 11.03Mbps and the current fastest average global speed held by Taiwan of 85Mbps.
Whilst incredible speeds of this magnitude have been previously accomplished exclusively in laboratory conditions, the system developed by Scientists in Australia is able to work on Australia’s fibre optic network, marking a world first for internet speed on existing infrastructure.
The speeds were accomplished on current infrastructure by using a ‘micro-comb’ device, replacing the 80 lasers currently used in telecommunications hardware.
The micro-comb acts as a laser source made up of infrared lasers produced by a single chip, with each laser able to have the capacity to be used as a separate communications channel.
The researchers aim to scale up the current transmitters from hundreds of gigabytes per second towards tens of terabytes per second without increasing size, weight tor cost.
The research team was led Monash University’s Dr Bill Corcoran, RMIT’s Professor Arnan Mitchell and Swinburne’s Professor David Moss.
Professor Arnan Mitchell, RMIT University, said: “Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fibre links with minimal cost,”
“Initially, these would be attractive for ultra-high speed communications between data centres. However, we could imagine this technology becoming sufficiently low cost and compact that it could be deployed for commercial use by the general public in cities across the world.”