Internet speed record shattered at 178 terabits per second

[EJMB]

Not sure if this has been posted before but might as well...

 

Summary

UCL engineers, together with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second (178,000,000 megabits a second).
They claim it would be possible to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second. 

This was achieved by transmitting data through a much wider range of colors of light, or wavelengths, than is typically used in optical fiber through new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations. They are basically patterns of signal combinations that alter the phase, brightness and polarization of the wavelengths, in order to fit more information into light without the wavelengths interfering with each other. 

The data that make up the world’s first image of a black hole was absurdly heavy and, therefore, had to be stored on half a ton of hard drives and transported by plane. Thus, the speed record raises the possibility of taking less than an hour to download the same data from that image.

 

 

Quote

" “While current state-of-the-art cloud data-center interconnections are capable of transporting up to 35 terabits a second, we are working with new technologies that utilize more efficiently the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fiber bandwidth and enabling a world record transmission rate of 178 terabits a second,” said Lidia Galdino, lead researcher on the study. "

 

I am very much interested in this as it will open the avenue for fully based cloud computing for everything (and I mean everything) in the world where everything can be accessed in an instant. Although there will be some socio-political concerns with that possibility...it might be an inevitability moving forward.

 

Sources

1. Optical Fibre Capacity Optimisation via Continuous Bandwidth Amplification and Geometric Shaping. DOI: 10.1109/LPT.2020.3007591
   https://newatlas.com/telecommunications/internet-speed-record178-terabits-per-second/
   https://www.techexplorist.com/ucl-engineers-achieved-record-internet-speed-178-terabits-per-second/34838/

[AndrewZScorpion]

Wow, finally fast enough to download games quickly.

[Moonzy]

178,000,000 megabits a second

 

how many jpegs is that?

[EJMB]

13 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

So phones physically connected to landline optical cables and ridiculous data bills

 

Genius.

Nope, not what I meant though but I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic but alright.

 

I meant having all the computing and storage elements of everything in central "cloud" areas so there is a possibility that in the future the only thing we'll have in our home as personal computers will be screens and I/O connected to the cloud and all your data and computing needs will be handled from it. 

 

For phones, wearables and mobile devices, 5G will probably handle the wireless portion of this "cloud" future.

[ProjectBox153]

6 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

178,000,000 megabits a second

 

how many jpegs is that?

A lot. A whole lot. 

[Arika]

the bottleneck would be your drive. wtf.

 

although, this would require completely new infrastructure...again.

[Arika]

1 minute ago, Caroline said:

my country with an avg speed of 1.7 mbps

i can't tell you how perfect it is that you said that and then the image didn't even load

 

[Trik'Stari]

21 minutes ago, EJMB said:

I am very much interested in this as it will open the avenue for fully based cloud computing for everything (and I mean everything) in the world where everything can be accessed in an instant. Although there will be some socio-political concerns with that possibility...it might be an inevitability moving forward.

Can we please not do cloud for everything?

 

The best argument will always be "what if it goes down".

[EJMB]

10 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

Can we please not do cloud for everything?

 

The best argument will always be "what if it goes down".

I hope they don't but a lot of people want to have a hassle-free experience like have everything done for them...not a fan of it to be honest.

 

I'm more concerned about who controls the cloud...you can only imagine what kind of power they would hold.

[WereCat]

Imagine having Internet this fast and downloading a CoD Warzone update. 

 

This is how fast it downloads with my 500Mbps connection (for reference) 

[Doobeedoo]

Very cool. I'll continue waiting my place to move from ADSL speeds. 

[jollander]

Oh wow!

I was present when the previous record (1.6 terabit) was set in dreamhack 2018. Even got to meet Alex and Brandon! The fact that the record was beat a hundred times over is insanely cool.

[George.]

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

178,000,000 megabits a second

 

how many jpegs is that?

/8 for megabytes

and say a modern phone/camera creates a 10mb jpeg file, that'd be 2,225,000 jpegs.

[George.]

Super Mario Bros was around 31 Kilobytes.

So at this speed you could transfer  the whole super mario bros game roughly 718 MILLION times in 1 second. 

 

Maybe sth more modern...like Call of Duty Modern Warfare:

200 gigs game at this transfer speed would result in roughly 112 call of duty's being transfered in 1 second.

Or for the impatient gamer who awaits his single instance of CoD to download, that'd take about 0,01 seconds to complete.

 

P.S. that's without any tcp overhead taken into consideration.

[RoseLuck462]

Time for Linus to upgrade his servers again...

[EJMB]

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

So the mobile devices turn into bricks whenever there is no connection, and still ridiculous data bills?

 

Genius

yes and no

The future would seem that the ultimate goal is to have every bit of the habitable earth (I'm not a fan of this to be honest) be connected in some manner through wireless technology such as 5g or whatever generation as the case may be in the future at the bare minimum. Failsafes such as redundancy of local nodes/stations and backup power storage and generation will most likely be put in place to prevent any downtimes (so no, it most likely won't turn into a brick given that local stations would likely be put in place and would function more should central areas be disabled for some reason and I'm sure every phone then would be given some sort of calability although much more limited)  but as you alluded to, there still the possibility of unfortunate regular or catastrophic events to occur such as an EMP from a nuclear blast, a cataclysmic event such as natural disasters destroy facilities, loss of power or a multitude of things could go wrong and so there always exists that possibility and so I agree with you that they may turn into bricks as well.

We'll see

[Lurick]

I was debating posting this but glad someone did as it's really awesome to see this stuff coming around. The Australian fiber comb is really what excites me as that could mean huge shifts in bandwidth for data center applications and really boost capacity without much/any changes to the fiber.

To put this into perspective as to how many (non-DWDM) network ports this is:

800Gb ports = 223 total ports

400Gb ports = 445 total ports

100Gb ports = 1780 total ports

 

At 36 ports of 100Gb per linecard you're looking at just over three Nexus 9516 chassis fully maxed out with linecards. The 9516 is a 16 slot 21RU chassis (~3 feet tall). Power draw for ONE chassis fully loaded is around 19.5kW under max load. So you're looking at something like 65kW to push that much bandwidth across three chassis. Now I do want to state this example is not using DWDM which can put multiple lambdas on a single cable and compact things down but just for scale of what it could cost in terms of power/footprint from a data center perspective.

 

If you use something with DWDM then you could probably get it into a single chassis and probably drop the power draw and footprint down a lot it just depends on the number of lambdas you get on a single fiber as to how many ports/linecards you would need. So if you assume around 100 lambdas totaling 10Tb/s on a single fiber then you're looking at 18 fibers so you can see how things shrink down.

[RejZoR]

12 hours ago, Moonzy said:

178,000,000 megabits a second

 

how many jpegs is that?

About 700.000 jifs.

[Centurius]

13 hours ago, EJMB said:

 

They claim it would be possible to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second. 
 

 

178 Tbps is roughly 22.3 TB of storage, there is no way the Netflix library is that small. Even the Open Connect appliances they install in ISP datacenters for faster speeds to end users contain ten times that and those don't contain the entire library.

 

Quote

I am very much interested in this as it will open the avenue for fully based cloud computing for everything (and I mean everything) in the world where everything can be accessed in an instant. Although there will be some socio-political concerns with that possibility...it might be an inevitability moving forward.

This isn't even remotely intended for actual widespread use. These speeds are possible only under incredibly specific conditions and at a price that no consumer or business can afford. At best you'll see this used for site to site connections between research institutes and the like where they can actually utilize that datarate. Most of the world is still on 10 Mbps or less, the high end for consumers has only the last year or two started moving into >1 Gbps speeds for home networks and less than that for internet. Even the largest companies often don't have more than a 400 Gbps uplink and getting even that costs millions. By the time a regular consumer can download at 178 Terabits, we'll likely have colonies on Mars.

[Murasaki]

That's great! Won't ever experience it.

 

/s

[CarlBar]

20 minutes ago, Murasaki said:

That's great! Won't ever experience it.

 

/s

 

Eh depends on your age, give it 40 years and you might.

[S w a t s o n]

Wait there's existing 35 terabit deployments? Who the fuck has that shit, literal network backbone providers?

[Roswell]

I have a feeling that the entire Netflix catalog is larger than 22TB.

[Lurick]

11 hours ago, S w a t s o n said:

Wait there's existing 35 terabit deployments? Who the fuck has that shit, literal network backbone providers?

Using DWDM, yes. Data center interconnections for example use this as well.

[LAwLz]

Does anyone know if they mentioned range anywhere?