Researchers at Technical University of Denmark’s (DTU) High-Speed Optical Communications (HSOC) team have been able to transfer data at 43Tbps with a single laser in the transmitter, setting a new world data transfer record.
Eclipsing the earlier record of 32Tbps set by Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the latest breakthrough was achieved by using a new single multi-core optical fibre from the Japanese telecoms major NTT.
Researchers noted that data speed competition has been the driving force behind the development of technology that can compete with the exponential growth of internet traffic, which is presently deemed to be rising by about 50% every year.
Furthermore, the increasing transfer speeds are claimed to offer environmental benefits. Emissions from the Internet’s overall energy consumption currently equate to over 2% of overall man-made carbon emissions.
"DTU noted: It is therefore essential to identify solutions for the internet that make significant reductions in energy consumption while simultaneously expanding the bandwidth."
"This is precisely what the DTU team has demonstrated with its latest world record.
"DTU researchers have previously helped achieve the highest combined data transmission speed in the world – an incredible 1 petabit per second – although this involved using hundreds of lasers."