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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.
...that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with tapes?! And that was in the 70's or 80's, I think.
Imagine today, filling up a semi with double-layer DVDs, with all the data on them compressed using modern compression schemes?! If the semi can go 60 mph, and the internal dimensions of its trailer are 41' by 8' by 9' (meaning you can fit 23 exabytes on the truck, assuming the data on a DVD are compressed with a 1.75 mean compression factor), your data is moving at a speed of 25080.60713 exabyte-inches per second. This is pretty fast. Of course, the detailed computations made to come up with this figure do not take into consideration the time it would take you to purchase the above DVDs, compress and burn the data to all of them, and then load the above truck with them. If this is one of those "how long is eternity" problems (like the one in Bless Me Ultima where a bird has to transport a mountain from one side of the world to the other, holding only one granule of sand in its beak at a time, with a round trip time of 12 weeks... and when it finishes, that's only the first day of eternity) and you have to walk to the store to buy the DVDs, and you're only allowed to buy one at a time.... then you'll realize that you're better off ordering DSL.