covering the week's top tech stories
with a slight linux bias a team of
university college london engineers have
set a new world record
internet speed and you won't believe how
fast it is
they've been able to achieve internet
transmission speed a fifth faster than
the previous record
the the research team led by dr lydia
galdino achieved a data transmission
rate of 178
terabits a second that's 178 million
megabits a second
compare that to the 50 megabits you're
getting at home
at 178 terabits per second it would be
possible to download the entire netflix
library in less than a
second the record which is double the
capacity of any system currently in use
worldwide
was achieved by transmitting data
through a much wider range of colors of
light
or wavelengths than is typically used in
optical fiber
current infrastructure uses a limited
spectrum bandwidth of
4.5 terahertz with 9 terahertz
commercial bandwidth systems
entering the market whereas the
researchers used a bandwidth
of 16.8 terahertz to do this researchers
combine different amplifier technologies
needed to boost the signal power over
the wider bandwidth and maximize speed
by developing new patterns of signal
combinations that make best use of the
phase
brightness and polarization properties
of the light
in this way they were able to manipulate
the properties of each individual
wavelength
a huge benefit of the technique is that
it can be deployed on
already existing infrastructure by
simply upgrading the amplifiers that are
located
on optical fiber routes at 40 to 100
kilometer intervals
it would be shockingly cheap to perform
such an upgrade
upgrading an amplifier would cost around
21 000 or about
420 dollars per kilometer if we upgraded
every 50 kilometers
compare that to installing new optical
fibers which can in urban areas cost up
to three-fourths of a million
dollars per kilometer lead author dr
galdener
dino a lecturer at ucl and a royal
academy of engineering research fellow
said while current state-of-the-art
cloud data center interconnections are
capable of transporting up to 35
terabits a second
we are working with new technologies
that utilize more efficiently the
existing infrastructure
making better use of optical fiber
bandwidth and enabling a world record
transmission rate of 178 terabits
a second the speed achieved is close to
the theoretical limit of data
transmission set out by american
mathematician
claude shannon in 1949. i want that
bandwidth
right install that at my studio you know
it was it's
it's interesting i mean there's two
things that kind of jumped out at me
about this story the first one
uh what becca was kind of getting to
about um
24 000 i think for 50 kilometers
or per kilometer whatever it was um to
to do the math was there yeah it was
there we've butchered it so far
but that's right but significantly
cheaper significantly make this upgrade
than to lay new fiber well yeah and so
interestingly enough
uh this summer or i guess this spring
when when
covid kind of brought the world to its
knees
uh at our my church we were looking to
stream
uh once we started getting back into the
building we had
really slow internet like half meg
upload
ouch yeah right so we reached out to
different isps and we said okay
what would it take to run you know first
we looked into fiverr then we looked
into dsl then we looked into
cable the one kilometer actually i think
it's 0.8 kilometers from
the junction box at the corner to where
our property line was and every quote we
got was
six figures or more yeah and i'm like
we're talking a kilometer
and then i'm hearing this and i'm like
this is amazing but at the same time the
fact that it's utilizing
light and i mean here we are in a studio
with light bulbs all around us now
they're all led
so that's not quite the same thing but
how neat would it be
if this technology could be advanced to
the point where we're getting our
internet off a light bulb
if it's if it's through like how neat
would that be
like it's gotta be a little more refined
than that i mean
fiber optics are i i agree but you look
at where the internet was 25 years ago
yeah like imagine 15 years from now you
flick on a light and boom
like oh jeff your predicament that you
have at your church or that you had
presumably you've found a solution at
least to get your body
oh okay so you're wireless so you're
getting about 20 megs
per second uh 20 up 45 down yeah okay
yeah so that's not bad that's pretty
good
no we could stream that's good expensive
wouldn't it be cheaper
this is just a crazy thought but buy the
property on the corner that's near the
junction box
buy the property and have them run
a six foot length from the junction box
to a little tiny tower and put a
ubiquity antenna on that
that is pointed at your church that has
like air fiber you know which is like
gigabit a second you know it's funny we
have we actually have
our sign there that we rent from the
person who owns the property
so put a little ubiquity antenna on top
of your sign
connect it to the fiber and you'd have
to have like some kind of a box that
powers everything and and keeps it
secure
from it's got a powered light anyway
well there you go so now put it free so
then
beam that beam that to your church you
can get gigabit per second internet
for the cost of a six foot length of
fiber run i actually think the box is
like a foot
from the pole well there you go that's
your answer
where were you six months ago i don't
know nobody asked me
and this is what came to me just now but
you