back to article Faster, Igor! Boffins stuff 255 Tbps down ONE fibre

The 2014 game of “leapfrog with fibre speed records” has a new and probably temporary leader, with boffins from China, the US and The Netherlands claiming a 255 Tbps record in a single fibre over 1 km. As always with such things, it pays to understand the conditions under which the boffins are claiming the record, and the …

  1. Winkypop Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Pfffft !

    Here in Australia we have copper.

    And that's copper wires powered by coal too.

    We don't need no steenkin 21st century!

    1. Adam Foxton

      Re: Pfffft !

      Obligatory Futurama quote: "Those things are all from the 19th century"

  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    So...

    So, my question is, does this system treat the 7 cores more or less independently (so if a normal fiber is single core, you could get about 1/7th the throughput -- still an impressive 36Tbps.) Or is it using some techniques that'd work exclusively on multiple-core fibers? I'm impressed either way; luckily I don't have any fiber installed in my place yet so I don't have to worry about it being obsolete 8-)

  3. Mark 85

    Ok...

    I guess these "records" have as much in common with the real world as race cars with a factory car?

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: Ok...

      The speed record is fun for the boffins, but it's also driving technology forwards. (Which is also true of F1 racing).

      I'm not sure what immediate use there is for such technology. If there's a straightforward distance/speed trade-off, 50+ km starts looking useful for Telcos to link urban centres? If it can be made cheap enough, perhaps new freedoms to put computers in one place and their solid-state storage in a diffrerent one?.

      It may be a bit like inventing the Laser, which for its first few years was described as "a solution looking for a problem". The problems duly arrived and in many cases were already solved, bar the details.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. nedge2k

        Re: Ok...

        indeed, for instance, one of the ideas behind the hybrid electric turbos powering the current crop of F1 cars is already making its way into production cars - see Volvo Drive-E. It's not exactly the same tech (it won't harvest energy from exhaust gas) but it will reduce turbo lag. </tangent>

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To put this into perspective two of these cables could supply every household in the UK with an average broadband connection running flat out (assuming you only needed to transmit the data 1km of course).

    Google informs me that average speed in the UK is currently 18.7Mbps and there are about 25.7m households which works out at a bit under 500Tbps. That's a lot of data by anyone's standards.

    1. nedge2k

      might want to factor GPRS/HSDPA/LTE into the equation but your point is valid, 10 cables would probably do us for the forseeable (assuming everyone ends up on 100Mbps and everything gets streamed, in 4k)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    its a real shame that bits and bytes both begin with B because this makes it completely unknown which is being quoted at you. I know there are conventions , and sometimes the B is Big , sometimes its small but there no way of knowing if the quotee knows this. So basicly your guessing or canceling out because your comparing with other speeds from same source.

    and by the way my brand new motherboard with brand new drivers and brand new usb3 stick achieve no where near the quoted speed for usb3. how can that be ? new everything - what more can you do?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the other important question is...

    How much for the transmission/reception hardware?

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