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A bunch of researchers from Japan have done a Usain Bolt on the digital highway — running away with the record for the fastest internet speed ever.
They have successfully transferred data at a speed of 319 terabits per second. With that kind of broadband speed you can download 57,000 full-length movies in 1 second or the entire Spotify library in under 3 seconds.
Viable demo
To put this achievement in context, NASA’s backbone runs at 400 gigabytes per second, while a majority of us in India get broadband services at a mere 512kbps.
What makes the feat of the researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NIICT) even more interesting is that they used the existing optical fibre infrastructure to achieve the record speed. This means their method can be integrated into the fibre optic infrastructure with minimal effort.
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NIICT has built a long-distance transmission of over 3,001 km, and according to it, this demonstration shows compatibility for near- term adoption in existing cable technologies.
Members of the Indian broadband community welcomed this new development enthusiastically, especially given that high-speed transmission has a very pertinent use case in India.
TV Ramachandran, President of Broadband India Forum, said that current Indian transmission systems are not equipped to handle India’s humongous data appetite which is the highest in the world. He reckons that at the moment “we have 500 million or fewer users that are using the internet and this number is likely to grow”.
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Moreover, video content has especially taken hold in the Indian population, which requires even greater speeds. “If you look at current transmission systems aggregating data to the central processor, you will face challenges as the current systems are not capable of handling such high-capacity transmission. Which is where such developments become pertinent,” said Ramachandran.
Long-term investment
Pranav Roach, President, Hughes Network Systems India Ltd, a satellite-based broadband company, believes that this technology will take some time to implement on the ground. “This is a long-term, high-investment project, therefore while it is a step in the right direction, it will translate into a real-life solution quite far out into the future.”
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