A situation I’m sure we all know. We want to upload a file or stream a video and the Internet is simply too slow again. Especially during the home office phase, the drop in network speed was clearly noticeable. But what we know today in terms of Internet speeds will soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at the universities of Monash, Swinburne and RMIT have now reached a speed that makes 100 Mbit/s or 200 Mbit/s seem extremely slow.
In a new research paper, the researchers have now described how they managed to establish an Internet connection that reached speeds of 44.2 Tb/s (terabits per second).
However, they did not use any special lines or networks for this, but used standard optical fibres both in the research laboratory and in Melbourne. To achieve these speeds, researchers in Australia used so-called “soliton crystal micro-combs”, i.e. optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators. In an interview with The Verge the researchers said
“What our research demonstrates is the ability for fibers that we already have in the ground, thanks to the NBN project, to be the backbone of communications networks now and in the future. We’ve developed something that is scalable to meet future needs,” – Bill Corcoran, Monash University
Mashable has shown the following example to better represent the speed: 44.2 terabits per second corresponds to 5.525 terabytes per second. The Pornhub website announced in 2019 that they were hosting 11 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to 11,000 terabytes. At the now discovered Internet speed, it takes about 1991 seconds or 33.2 minutes to download the entire page.
It may still take some time before this Internet speed really reaches us, but in a few years the dream of a fast Internet can become reality.
