The number is 1.02 petabits per second — 1,020,000 gigabits — and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan says it is the fastest data transmission ever recorded over a long distance. Gadget-site arithmetic makes it vivid: at that rate you could download the roughly 100 GB of English Wikipedia ten thousand times in a single second, or the whole Netflix catalogue before you finished reading this sentence. The more important number, though, is 0.125 millimetres.
What they did
NICT’s Photonic Network Laboratory, with Japanese cable-maker Sumitomo Electric and several European research institutes, used an optical fibre with 19 separate cores — 19 light-carrying channels inside a single strand — that is exactly the same diameter as the standard single-core fibre installed around the world. The signal ran through an 86.1 km loop 21 times, a total of 1,808 kilometres, carrying 180 independent data streams at once. The combined figure of 1.86 exabits per second per kilometre is also a record. Sumitomo built the fibre; NICT built the transmitters, receivers and amplifiers to drive it.
Why the diameter is the point
Laboratory speed records usually involve exotic cables that could never be deployed. This one does not. A fibre with the standard outer diameter fits existing ducts, connectors, splicing tools and submarine cable designs. “We wanted to show that ultra-high-speed, long-distance connections are possible using today’s infrastructure,” NICT said. In other words, the route to a hundredfold increase in capacity may not be digging new trenches or laying new sea cables, but pulling multi-core fibre through the paths that already exist.
The Bangladesh angle
Bangladesh’s international bandwidth depends on two submarine cables and a third, SEA-ME-WE 6, due to land in the next year or two, plus terrestrial links through India. Each is a decades-long investment negotiated by consortium. Multi-core fibre changes that arithmetic: a future cable of the same physical size could carry an order of magnitude more, and the domestic backbone — the NTTN fibre that runs along highways and railway lines — could be upgraded by replacing strands rather than routes. Demand is not in doubt; streaming, cloud services and AI workloads are growing faster than capacity everywhere. NICT has not said when 19-core fibre will be commercially available, but the record has moved it from the laboratory question to the procurement question.
Source: Indian Express, via Prothom Alo.
