Friday, September 28, 2012

That's ridiculous

Japan's NTT breaks fibre optic data speed record 
Japan's incumbent telecommunications carrier, NTT, is claiming a telecommunications speed record, demonstrating a fibre technology able to carry 1 Petabit-per-second - a million gigabits - over a distance of 50 kilometers, using a single fibre.

The technology - at this stage a research demonstration not ready for commercialization - would serve not end users, but the "trunk" links between exchanges. The carrier selected the 50 km distance as reflecting the typical distance between medium-haul telecommunications exchanges in Japan.

NTT's report states that it used a specially-designed optical fibre in which one fibre strand contained 12 "cores" - light paths within the fibre that don't interact with each other. Each of those fibres carried an 84.5 Terabit-per-second signal to achieve the total 1 Pbps throughput.
So, how much data does this really represent in something we can understand?:
 The 1 Pb/s capacity of the NTT-demonstrated link would carry the equivalent of 5,000 two-hour HDTV movies each second, the company says.

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