The Japanese get all the most awesome stuff. This is an undisputed fact… well, at least an envy-inspiring trend. The latest example comes from not one, but two Japanese tech development teams who have created data links utilizing a single optical fiber to transmit more than 100 terabits per second.
The first team to report success was a team at NEC who reported squeezing 370 light pulses into the optical pickup of a fiber-optic connection, resulting in a data-sending rate of 101.7 Tbps.
The second and current record-holding team came from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. They reported reaching a whopping 109 Tbps by using a fiber with 7 light-guiding cores instead of the standard single core. Each core carried 15.6 terabits per second.
NEC’s Ting Wang believes that due to the complexity and cost of both techniques, the first implementations are likely to be at giant data centers like those run by Google, Facebook and Amazon.com, but that’s not stopping me from dreaming of the day I can plug directly into a connection that fast.
(via Engadget & New Scientist)
