Researchers at University College London achieve the feat of world fastest Internet speed

What is the maximum upper limit you see for a super-fast Internet connection? Probably it would be 100Mbps, 1Gbps or may be 1000Gbps. Now, prepare your mind for just blown off as a team of researchers has clocked an unexpected higher Internet of 178,000 Gbps – the world fastest Internet speed. For reference optical fiber enabled data centers at current can transmit data at speed of 35, 000 Gbps.

 A team of researchers at University College London led by Dr. Lidia Galdino in collaboration with Xtera and KDDI Research achieved this feat. The Internet speed is that enough, for instance, if you want to download the entire Netflix library at once, you can do with this speed within a second. This speed is of 4 times what the team of Australian researchers recorded earlier in this year.

As the researchers explained in the blog post, they used much wider wavelengths than those used in existing optical fiber systems and settled for a spectrum bandwidth of a whopping 16.8THz. In comparison, our current systems offer a bandwidth of 4.5THz and we have just seen 9THz commercial bandwidth arrival.

For making the things more interesting, the Internet speed is just close to what theoretical data transmission limit given by American mathematician, Claude Shannon in 1949. The speed is enough to download the first image of a Block Hole in less than an hour. In real, such images were stored on many hard drives and transported by plane.

This is news during the time when whole world is facing challenges of COVID-19 pandemic and people are working from home and busy doing activities on Internet day and night. Hence, what we observed that the services are getting disrupted and streaming companies reducing their video quality to compensate the extra load.

Such massive Internet speed might be beneficial. However, this fact cannot be denied that the overall Internet demand has only risen over the decades.

Dr. Gadlino said, they are “working with new technologies that utilise more efficiently the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fibre bandwidth and enabling a world record transmission rate of 178 terabits a second.”

As per the blog post, It is possible to cost effectively improve the existing infrastructure by upgrading the amplifiers located on optical fiber routs at 40-100km intervals. On comparing laying new optical fiber cables, this would be cheaper.