Tech is perhaps five years away from actual deployment, we're told
At the Register:Record-breaking Aussie boffins send 44.2 terabits a second screaming down 75km of fiber from single chip. The news from Monash University shows there is still plenty of headroom for fibre broadband.
Katyanna Quach writes:
Australian scientists say they have broken data communications speed records by shifting 44.2 terabits per second over
75km of glass fibre from a single optical chip.
The five-by-ninemillimetre prototype gizmo is described as a micro-comb in a paper detailing its workings, published in Nature Communications on Friday. Light shone into the micro-comb is looped around a ring to produce 80 beams at
various infrared wavelengths. Each beam carries a stream of data.
Elsewhere the report says the technology is perhaps five years away from deployment. It's possible it could be used on
New Zealand's Ultrafast Broaband network, although we may have to rethink what we mean by 'ultrafast' in this context.
At the time of writing Chorus is rolling out Hyperfibre, which boosts broadband speeds on the UFB network to 4 Gbps and
will later extend to 8 Gbps. These speeds seemed unattainable and abstract a decade ago with the UFB network first
started operating.
So 44.2 Tbps may seem exotic now, but could be everywhere in time for the next but one Rugby World Cup.
Aussie scientists hit fibre speeds of 44.2 Tbps was first posted at billbennett.co.nz.