Forget about WiFi 6E and 5G technology, optical cables are still the backbone of the internet. Fortunately, researchers in Japan were able to bring data transfers to another level. As a matter of fact, they just set a new fiber optic data transmission record.

Researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) were able to send data down a custom multi-core fiber optic cable at a speed of 1.02 petabits per second over a distance of 51.7 km successfully. If you find it hard to imagine the speed, imagine being able to send 127,500 GB of data every second— that’s exactly how fast it is. According to the researchers, this is also enough capacity for over “10 million channels of 8K broadcasting per second.” New Atlas even pointed out that this is also 100,000 times faster than the promised next generation of high-speed gigabit connections providing internet to home users.

The NICT researchers for this project summarized:

In this experiment, by broadening the Raman amplification bandwidth to the full S-band and using customized thulium-doped fiber amplifiers (TDFAs) for S-band and extended L-band erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), we were able to use a record 20 THz optical spectrum with total of 801 x 25 GHz spaced wavelength channels, each with dual-polarization-256 QAM modulation for high spectral density in all wavelength bands.