Danish Researchers Set New 43Tbps Data Transfer Record

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have reclaimed their world record for data transfer with a single laser by setting a new benchmark of 43Tbps, beating the previous best of 26TBps, set by a team at the Karlsruhe Institut fur Technologie in 2011.

The DTU’s High Speed Optical Communications (HSOC) team was able to beat that by using a new type of optical fibre borrowed from Japanese telecoms giant NTT, which contains seven cores, or glass threads, rather than the single core used in standard fibre.

The HSOC team has held the world record for a single laser on a number of occasions. It was the first to break the 1Tbps barrier in March 2009 and upped this to 5.1Tbps later that year. In 2011 it set a new record of 9.5Tbps, which stood until the German team beat it later that year.

World record data transfer

The DTU says this worldwide competition is necessary to develop the technology required to accommodate the anticipated growth in data traffic, which is currently increasing by between 40 and 50 percent each year.

It has also stressed the need to find energy efficient solutions as the energy consumption of the Internet rises. It currently stands at two percent of all man-made carbon emissions, the same as the aviation and shipping industries, but neither of these are growing at the same rate as the Internet.

“It is therefore essential to identify solutions for the Internet that make significant reductions in energy consumption while simultaneously expanding the bandwidth,” says the university. “This is precisely what the DTU team has demonstrated with its latest world record.”

HSOC team researchers have also previously helped achieve the highest combined data transmission speed ever recorded, 1 petabit per second, but this involved using hundreds of lasers rather than just one.

Last month, Alcatel-Lucent set a new record for data transfer over a copper line, sending 10Gbps over a distance of 30 metres. It is hoped that the development of such technology will improve the speeds of Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connections, which use copper for the final few metres between the cabinet at the home.

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