Record-Breaking Data Transmission Could Transmit Everything On Netflix In Less Than A Second

Researchers have broken the record for the world's first successful petabit-class transmission over more than 1,000 kilometers (610 miles). They were able to send 1.02 petabits per second over 1,808 kilometers (1,123 miles). That’s about the distance between Missouri and Montana, or Naples and Berlin.

This work was conducted by an international team led by the Photonic Network Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. For this achievement, the team developed a new 19-core optical fiber cable, with each fiber being a standard optical fiber. It’s their use together, as well as the employment of an amplification system, that allowed them to send this record-breaking transmission. 

A 19-core optical fiber cable was also used for a bigger transmission, 1.7 petabits per second, but on a much shorter distance, 63.5 kilometers (39 miles). The amplification enables a 30-fold increase in the distance of the petabit transmission.

Picturing the amount of data transmitted is actually difficult. A petabit is equivalent to 10¹⁵ bits. The memory unit of measurement in computers is in multiples of bytes (and there are 8 bits in every byte), so 1 petabit of data is around 125 terabytes. Your computer might have 1 or 2 terabytes of hard disk storage, but it is unlikely you have filled all that. 

According to Netflix, their catalog has over 18,000 titles, and allowing for a possibly generous 7 gigabytes per title, we are looking at 123 terabytes of data. And that could be sent in a single second.

The incredible transmission also needs to be contextualized in another way, to understand why it might be needed in the future. Our civilization lives on data, and every day it produces more. About 400 million terabytes of new data are created every day. Now, if this single system had to send them all, we would need over 2,000 days. The data obviously flows, but it is an indication that the future of the internet needs more speed.

And the team themselves are already planning on how to improve this record. The focus is mainly on improving the efficiency of the amplification technology and its digital signal processing. And then there is the big one: practical applications. The team still need to investigate how to best take this out of the lab.

The results of this demonstration were presented at the 48th Optical Fiber Communications Conference that took place in San Francisco last month.