Bell Labs Achieves 3.28Tbps Over Fiber

Dave-V writes: "Scientists at Bell Laboratories said they have set a world's record by transmitting 3.28 trillion bits of data per second over 300 kilometers of fiber optic cable. The research arm of Lucent Technologies said it was the industry's first demonstration of long distance, triple-terabit data transmission. Researchers achieved those speeds using Lucent's experimental optic fiber, called TrueWave. Bell Labs scientists said they used three 100-kilometer fiber spans to transmit 40 gigabits over each of the 40 wavelengths of light (colors) in the conventional C-band frequency range and 40 Gbits/s over each of the 42 channels in the long-wave L-band range."

The FoxNews article contains more details. With Iridum about to heat up in the worst way, and landlines jumping in capacity, maybe the future really does hold a fiber-optic link straight into every permanent structure on Earth.

Comments

When will this come into service?

[Raindeer]

It is great that they have shown the possibility to send this amount of data over a network. It would basically mean sending the entire contents of all harddisks (2000x) on my universities campusnetwork in about 1 minute. But when are we going to see this technology in service? It seems that not only do we need new repeaters, but also souped up glassfiber. Those are large investments and it may take some time too to get the prototype to become a real world model.

With Iridum about to heat up in the worst way, and landlines jumping in capacity, maybe the future really does hold a fiber-optic link straight into every permanent structure on Earth

My personal opinion is that fiber is definitely the way we are going to go espescially for long distance data transfer. The problem with satellite technology is the lag in the signal and the problem with wireless is that it has too low a bandwith. On the other hand fiber should be able to transmit a signal in 0.2 seconds to any place in the world. So a system where the last mile is covered by wireless and a backbone of fiber seems to be the most plausible way. Interesting little tidbit is that 0.2 seconds is also the maximum lag in a telephone conversation, before people judge it as unnatural.