New fibre optic record allows 50,000,000 movies to be streamed at once

A new speed record has been set for data transmission through an existing, commercially-installed fibre optic cable, with 450 terabits per second – or 450,000,000,000,000 bits per second – being beamed through a pair of cables underneath London’s busy streets.

Polina Bayvel at University College London and colleagues achieved the record using existing fibre optic cables running from their laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data centre in Canary Wharf, then back again. That rate of data transmission would be enough for around 50 million movies to be streamed simultaneously.

Bayvel says that the record achieved a data rate around ten times faster than is seen in current commercial networks, meaning that if it was rolled-out widely we could see an increase in internet bandwidth equivalent to adding nine new cables alongside each existing one, but without having to go through the cost or inconvenience of installing a single metre more cable.

Such a leap in data transfer rates might be so large that human users of the internet can’t make use of it all, but that the AI boom could certainly take advantage of it. “There’s only a certain amount of data that anyone could process – you can only watch so many movies,” she says. “But AI infrastructure is generating a lot of data, and that data is is spewing into the network.”

The record was set thanks to custom-designed hardware developed which allowed data to be sent in a wide spectrum of frequencies – from 1264 nanometres to 1617.8 nanometres – that far exceeds what is used in commercial networks today. These different frequencies required various new approaches to correct differing amounts and types of distortion, as laser pulses encounter different refractive indexes inside fibre optic cables at different intensities.

Faster speeds have been achieved before in highly regulated experiments, but this work crucially used existing cables which have been heavily used, have dirty connectors, sit underneath a bustling city full of traffic and noise, and represent a real-world test that shows it could be rolled-out on existing infrastructure. The researchers say that commercial roll-out could happen within five years.

Kerrianne Harrington at the University of Bath says that there are two streams of research in fibre optics: squeezing more bandwidth out of the cables that have already been deployed at great cost, and developing new types of cable that will remove some of the bottlenecks of that technology.

“The interesting thing about this work is it’s using what’s already in the ground, which is the expensive thing to change,” says Harrington. “I do think it’s a very practical approach to the problem. I would say that the work that’s shown in this paper has a more immediate benefit to increasing capacity than new fibres.”