Engineers Achieved the World's Fastest Internet Speed

Internet traffic has increased exponentially over the last decade, reaching roughly 4.13 billion internet users worldwide.

Besides the growing number of users, connection quality is also improving. As of 2019, Singapore had the fastest average fixed broadband internet speed at 197.50 Mbps.

Before now, a team in Japan held the record for the world’s fastest data transmission.

But that’s no longer the case, thanks to engineers at University College London. Last week, the researchers claimed to have achieved internet transmission speed that’s a fifth faster than the previous record.

In a statement, lead author of the study and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, Dr. Lidia Galdino said:

“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.”

The researchers described how they achieved the record-breaking feat in a new paper in IEE Photonics Technology Letters.

Setting a new World Record for Internet Speed

The UCL researchers partnered with two companies — Xtera and KDDI Research — on the project. Together, the team transmitted data through a much wider wavelength range that’s typically used in optic fiber.

For instance, infrastructures currently used bandwidth spectrum that ranges from 4.5THz to 9THz. On the other hand, the researcher achieved a bandwidth of 16.8THz, resulting in the world’s fastest internet speed.

According to Dr. Galdino, the team’s data transmission rate reached a whopping 178 terabits a second — or 178,000,000 megabits per second. That’s double the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world.

Such speed could download the entire Netflix library in less than a second. What’s more, it’s close to the theoretical limit that the American mathematician, Claude Shanon, set in 1949.

The good news is that internet providers can deploy the technique on existing infrastructures cheaply. They only need to upgrade the amplifiers that are located on optical fiber routes at 40-100km intervals.

Thanks to the new technology, we might be one step closer to meeting future data demands while lowering rates.

Read More: The Evolution of Internet Over the Last Decade