Want superfast broadband? Try 26Tbits/sec
Impatient computer users fed up with waiting for hefty downloads could benefit from a laser bandwidth breakthrough that enables data rates of 26Tbits/sec.
The uber-fast broadband landmark – equivalent of downloading 700 DVDs a second – using a single laser beam sent over 50Km, according to scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
The blazing speed puts into perspective BT’s proposed 100Mbits/sec fibre to the premises, which is 260,000 times slower. It's more than a million times faster than the Government's idea of "superfast" broadband, recently defined as 25Mbits/sec. The increased bandwidth stems from performing the maths behind the transfer using an opto-electrical decoding technique that is far faster than would be possible with straightforward electronic processing methods.
