- Future networks could transport petabit speeds without new cable forms
- The standard diameter fiber reaches a new milestone of capacity in laboratory test
- The average Internet speed of the US is eclipsed by innovative optical transmission
Buried under the streets of the city, the roads of the countryside and the bottom of the deep ocean are the glass threads that carry almost everything we do online.
These threads, often not wider than a human hair, already move amazing amounts of data, and now, Japanese researchers have further exceeded those limits, without changing the shape or size of the cable.
A team led by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan (NICT), which works with Sumitomo Electric and European collaborators, has reached a transmission speed of 1.02 petabits per second more than 1,808 kilometers.
A new world record
The test used a 19 -core optical fiber with a standard 0.125 mm coating diameter, which means that it is the same thickness as the fibers of a single nucleus already implemented in networks around the world.
Instead of requiring a completely new infrastructure, the cable squeezes 19 separate light routes in the space typically used for one.
That allows a dramatic leap in capacity while it remains compatible with existing systems.
It also marks the first time that a Petabit class signal has traveled more than 1,000 kilometers in a standard size fiber.
The result establishes a new world record for capacity of capacity of capacity in 1.86 exabits per second kilometer.
To simulate a long -distance spine, the signals were diving 21 times at 86.1 km from the new fiber. The amplifiers increased the signal in each pass and were carefully tune in to work in the wavelength bands C and L for the 19 cores.
Using 180 wavelengths modulated with 16qam, the system could handle large volumes of parallel data flows.
After traveling on the simulated route, the signals were separated by a multichannel receiver using the mimo digital signal processing.
This avoided adding more fiber nuclei or expanding the diameter of the cable, which would have made integration with current networks more difficult.
To put the new achievement in context, the average broadband speed in the US. At the beginning of 2025 it is around 290 Mbps. The new 1.02 petabits record per second is equal to 1,020,000,000 Mbps, more than 3.5 million times faster.
The results were presented in OFC 2025 as a document after the line, which offers an idea of how future optical networks could be.
Although it will not transform work or home connections overnight, research shows how far the standard fiber can reach. The team now aims to refine the efficiency of the amplifier and signal processing to approach the implementation of the real world.
With global data traffic that continues to grow, advances like this offer a way of stretching the infrastructure even more without the need to dig new trenches.
