Experimental Photonic Chips Can Deliver Internet Speed 44,000 Times More Than Existing Analogs
A research team from Australia was able to record the incredible speed of the Internet from a single light source, which is 44.2 terabits per second. This figure is 44,000 times faster than the fastest speed available today. This indicator became possible thanks to the use of a new type of optical chip.
What is the new chip
This unimaginable speed is made possible by a new device called the MicroComb. It can replace 80 separate infrared lasers at once, which can be used as separate channels.
The new device was tested on a 76.6 km optical link that runs between two university settlements in Melbourne, Australia.
With a bandwidth of 4 THz, a record speed of 44.2 Tbit / s was squeezed out of the network. In fact, it is very difficult to overestimate this speed. Indeed, at the moment, the highest available speed for consumers is Google Fiber, which guarantees an access speed equal to 1 Gb / s.
For example, the US Department of Energy's experimental ESnet is able to maximize speed of 400 Gbit / s, but this line is in a special reserve for organizations such as, like NASA.
What are the prospects for a new invention
The fact that the new device was realized thanks to the use of existing infrastructure such as optical fiber, indicates the fact that this development will be quite sufficient to scale up to full commercial use simply. And this does not require huge costs for production debugging.
However, don't expect photonic devices to flood the market any time soon, and you can download the entire Santa Barbara series in an instant. There is still a long way to go to integrate photonic chips into existing fiber optic networks.
And in the first phase, most likely, they will be used to provide high-speed communication between the main data centers. And only after the technology becomes significantly cheaper, it will be possible to see photonic chips in the private sector.
You can familiarize yourself with the results of the work done by scientists in the article that scientists published in the journal Nature Communications.
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