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New Data Transmission Record — 14 Tbps
deejne writes to alert us to a new bandwidth record: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The paper claims the previous record was "about 10 Tbps." In the new experiment, NTT sent data over 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of optical fiber, in 140 channels of 111 Gbps each.
While impressive, the feat was accomplished over a single optical fiber using proprietary amplifiers not in production. It certainly is innovative, but it is not an indication of speeds you will see in consumer level services. I see these high-bandwidth paradigms being very useful in the medical industry in the near future - especially for things like transferring high quality MRI images from hospital to hospital with very little delay, or in transferring patient ICU data to a centralized monitoring center - which is currently being done, but super-high bandwidth models open up avenues of information that are not currently available - anything from real-time HI-DEF video from the room, to real-time control of in-room instrumentation.
1) Yes, distance is cruically important in these measurements. There's no points in having gazillions of petabyte data transfer if it can only done from one corner of the lab to the other. Which is why all credible speed-of-information-transfer articles include a number with units of [ (bits / second) * distance].
2) The record is still held by the transmissions from Voyager II's encounter with Neptune.
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Current routers, like the Cisco CRS-1, use OC-768c/STM-256, which is about 40 Gbit/sec. Right now, there are a couple of camps in the IEEE, ones that want 40 Gbit Ethernet, others that want the factor of 10 increase that Ethernet has normally been associated with. Since there is no 100 Gbit SONET (that I'm aware of at least), these public demonstrations, this one by NTT and another by Lucent, prove that 100 Gbit Ethernet is possible, even for long haul. Some providers like at&t, Yahoo and Google, really need 100 Gbit Ethernet because they produce that much data, or provide 10 Gbit service to customers, and they need to aggregate it somehow.