Japan Has Shattered the Internet Speed Record at 319 Terabits per Second

We're in for an information revolution.Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. From a report: The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure. This could literally change everything.

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).

So Japan was the culprit!

[franzrogar]

So that's why my Internet connection was a fuc*ing snail all this week!

Comcast cap is 1.2TB...

[jacks smirking reven]

I can use that up in 0.0037 seconds!

Technology never ceases to amaze and wonder...

Re: Comcast cap is 1.2TB...

[napoleongoldfinger]

But, can you fax?

Re:

[antdude]

"Great Scott!" "This is heavy."

Demolish and rebuild.

[Ostracus]

All nice if you feel up to replacing a lot of amplifiers.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

All nice if you feel up to replacing a lot of amplifiers.

Worse, when they say, "it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure", they really mean, "the novel four-core optical fiber possesses the same diameter as a conventional single-core fiber, bracketing the protective cladding around it."

Re:

[zeeky boogy doog]

Presumably there is a good reason this requires four fibers in a common cladding, as opposed to... you know... just using four fibers.

My guess is, since they apparently transmit on both polarizations, the four somehow create stresses that render them into four polarization-maintaining fibers. PMF historically costs about a thousand times more than ordinary fiber. With any luck this will also bring the price of PMF down...

Oh my!

[Opportunist]

Just think of the amount of faxes you can send with that!

Re:

[srmalloy]

The next question is "How many 4K video streams will it take to fill its bandwidth?"

just one can max out your cap on comcast!

[Joe_Dragon]

just one can max out your cap on comcast!

Re:Oh my!

[fahrbot-bot]

The next question is "How many 4K video streams will it take to fill its bandwidth?"

I'm confused. Can you restate those quantities in terms of Libraries of Congress?

Re:

[Entrope]

You can use it to upload almost thirty Rhode Island-feet of Olympic-size swimming pools at a distance of three quadrillion beard-seconds per fortnight!

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Is that 4k hdr in raw at 60 fps hmm ,et me run the numbers... screw it, it's pas midnight, if I remember I'll post a reply to this tomorrow but it wil be quite a few, btw whas the 4k you refered 2 the thing they use in cinemas (dci) or the thing output from pcs/tvs and anything else, iirc the total ammount of pixels varies slightly

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Ok so we are talking about netflixs compressed to hell 4k, roger, than you fot informing me, on a different nit cone on netflix 4k is a premium product, don't be stingy on the bandwith look at 4k blurays minimum bandwidth, you have a long way to go to compete, and at keast outside the us neetering on home internet is not that common, and fiber deployments becoming more and more common

Re:

[bn-7bc]

That sonded snobbish, just to be clear, i did not say netflix shuld lock all 4k streams at 72Mbps, but for those with connections that can handle it , the option should be there for the client ( on users request) to request a 72Mbps stream ( or one that gives equivalent quality at a lower bandwidth ( who knows netflix might be using better codecs thar weren't around ( or cheap enugh to implement in hw) when the UHD BD standard was written)}

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Japan skipped 4k and went straight to 8k. The Olympics will be broadcast in 8k in Japan but everywhere else... I don't know if streams will be available, YouTube supports it if you have the hardware.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Or high-res tentacle porn

Re:

[Thelasko]

Just think of the amount of faxes you can send with that!

I know! Shotgun modem technology [zdnet.com] has really come a long way.

AT&T is getting ready for this ...

[fahrbot-bot]

With their new Extra Elite, Super-Duper, Extreme Unlimited plan -- to go alone with their other "Unlimited" plans (seriously, how can you have more than one "unlimited" plan) -- and 9G Wireless ... :-)

It's too fast!

[swirlingbrain]

to read anything on my vt100 terminal with lynx!

The MPAA will hate this.

[Kernel Kurtz]

Instead of sharing stuff on The Pirate Bay, I will just share the whole Pirate Bay.

40TB/s...

[John Allsup]

To imagine that that could transfer the contents of all the hard drives I own in a second or two.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Well taken your scenario I would emegine storage bandwidth an iops at each end wupill be a major chalange

And yet my home Internet connection :(

[bustinbrains]

Is slower than molasses.

That's a lot of PCIe lanes

[SWPadnos]

To put it in perspective, this is about the same transfer rate as 10,000 PCIe gen 5 lanes. Or 20,000 PCIe gen 4 lanes.

You could barely fill this pipe with a dozen racks of Epyc-based servers (at a measly 128 gen4 lanes each). You'd need 150+ computers, and double that if you actually wanted to read the data from somewhere (like an array of 5000 NVMe drives).

"Japan"

[backslashdot]

Can we quit with the tribalist nationalist communist BS? I am pretty sure just about every scientific and engineering advance is done building on the work of people all over the world. Should the guy who put the capstone on a pyramid get credit for building the entire pyramid?

Petabit networking

[gabebear]

It will be crazy when petabit networks are fully rolled out⦠The tech is starting to mature. https://www.pcworld.com/articl... [pcworld.com]

soon

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

Well I for one welcome our 319 TB ad-and-datamining-riddled website overlords!

I have not noticed the internet being slow...

[mikeiver1]

This is great and all but as noted by others, this is an expensive upgrade. As to the speed really who the hell needs 1Gb to the home let along 10Gb on offer sometimes? Seriously, unless you are say a radiologist working from home and pulling images constantly there is simply little need for such speeds. 100-200Mb is a perfectly serviceable connection. Anything more is throwing away money to the ISP. Besides most of the connections when tested properly are well below the claimed delivery speeds as the

Re:

[RespekMyAthorati]

100-200Mb is a perfectly serviceable connection

Damn straight.
And 64K is enough for anybody.

Re:

[Bengie]

Higher speeds increases network efficiency. Trunk congestion is almost entirely correlated with the duration of transfers. Most transfers consume a fixed amount of data. Reducing the duration by increasing the rate at which a customer can transfer that data greatly benefits the choke points.