Record Internet speed achieved at 178 Tbps

by Paul Davenport on September 01, 2020

With folks across the globe logging onto work and school from home – and streaming a lot of Netflix when they aren’t – network capacity has never been a hotter commodity.

As a result, people are hungry for higher-than-ever Internet speeds to stay connected in a work-from-home (WFH) world, and researchers at University College of London (UCL) have set a new record data transmission rate that could download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.

A team led by Dr. Lidia Galdino achieved Internet speeds of 178 Tbps by transmitting data through a much wider range of colors of light (wavelength) than used in common optical fibre. As a result, they achieved double the download capacity of any system currently deployed on Earth, and more than a fifth higher speeds than the previous record.

According to UCL, “researchers combined different amplifier technologies needed to boost the signal power over this wider bandwidth and maximised speed by developing new Geometric Shaping constellations […] manipulating the properties of each individual wavelength.”

While the speed record on it’s own is impressive, the real benefit of this development is that it can be deployed on existing infrastructure simply by upgrading amplifiers on optical fiber roots at 25-65 mile intervals. The researchers concluded that upgrading an amplifier would only cost £16,000 ($21,000) compared to the £450,000 ($600,000) per kilometre price tag of installing new cables.

While there is massive immediate demand for greater connectivity globally (the research found a 60 percent increase in Internet activity since the start of the pandemic), the study cites an exponential jump in traffic over the past 10 years as the true driver of the research. The technology is still very much in the proof-of-concept stage, but there’s already a need today for solutions that are built to handle networks with speeds supporting 100 Gbps connections or more.

Ensuring network performance isn’t just a matter of contracting for higher upload and download speeds. For the teams managing sprawling, enterprise-grade networks, they need visibility into what’s actually taking place on the network pathways between end users and their most important apps.

AppNeta is equipped to deliver visibility across the largest data center campus networks and down to a single remote workstation. To learn more about how it’s done, download our whitepaper, Proven Scalability for the World’s Most Distributed Networks.