100 Terabits Per Second Mark

Choman Saleem

              Topping The 100 Terabits Per Second Mark

     The networking and computer industry is evolving ever-so rapidly. Every  year, system performance is pushed and breaking new boundaries. Two separate research teams using ultrafast fiber optic technologies have accomplished to send more than 100 terabits of data per second through a single cable. To put the record-setting numbers in terms everyone can understand, that’s equivalent of sending three months of HD videos in one second. At this rate, you can send the contents of 250 double-sided Blue-Ray discs in a second.

The first team, NEC Corporation, achieved this data rate by altering the lights. NEC was able to send 101.7 terabits per second over 100 miles by stuffing pulses from 370 different lasers pooling into a single pulse that reached the end receiver. Every individual laser emitted a different frequency of light.The second team, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, carved up new channels within the fiber. The team from Japan used a seven-cored cable which was able to transmit 15.6 terabits per second per each core, resulting in a total of 109 terabits per second. Although these kinds of speeds won’t be viable to everyday users today, they are still an extremely important step to the future of communications. The traffic of data is growing at a rate of roughly 50 percent every year due to recent network demands, such as TV-on-the-web like Netflix and Hulu. The current practicality of 100 terabits per second is viable in places such as server farms at Amazon.  

Source:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/two-different-fiber-optic-technologes-top-100-terabit-second-speeds-fastest-ever