A research group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) made a world record by inventing a new type of optical fiber which is capable to transfer data at the speed of 43 Tera Bits per sec or 5.4 Tera Byte per second or 5375 GB/s.
According to DTU, you could transfer the entire contents of your 1TB hard drive in a fifth of a second.
The previous record over a single optical fiber — 26 terabits per second, set by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
There have been plenty of network demonstrations of hundreds or even thousands of terabits (petabits) per second with multiple lasers over multiple fibers.
DTU’s use of a single laser over a single fiber.
While the researchers did only use a single laser, it used multi-core fiber. This is still a single filament of glass fiber, but it has multiple individual channels that can each carry their own optical signal. In this case, DTU used multi-core optical fibers with seven cores, produced by Japanese telecom giant NTT.
Currently, the fastest commercial single-laser-single-fiber network connections max out at just 100Gbps (100 Gigabit Ethernet). The IEEE is currently investigating the feasibility of either a 400Gbps or 1Tbps Ethernet standard, with ratification not due until 2017 or later.
Obviously DTU’s 43Tbps won’t have much in the way of real-world repercussions for now — but it’s a very good sign that we’re not going to run out of internet bandwidth any time soon.