World's Fastest Internet at 40 Gbps?

Bangalore: Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a hollow-core fibre optic cable that has transmitted wavelength division, multiplexed data at 99.7 percent the speed of light in vacuum.

They claim to have increased the speed at which data can be transmitted over fibre optic cables, a link that forms the backbone of the internet.

If faster light can travel through a fibre, the potential latency of data transmission is lower. To compare, the solid silica glass fibre optic cables that are used today propagate light at some 69 percent the speed of light in a vacuum.

The trouble that is found with hollow-core fibers to transmit data is that these cables have struggled to keep up the combination of low loss, wide bandwidth and mode-coupling characteristics that is required for high capacity data transmission.

The researchers have claimed to achieve a required balance of these factors, with a recorded loss of 3.5dB per km, and using a 160nm bandwidth channel to transmit 37 WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) channels at 40Gbps which according to them is 1.54 microseconds/km faster than over conventional fibre.

Besides general benefit in faster transmission, wide bandwidth, low latency signal transmission links are in demand to increase the rate at which algorithmic financial trading can take place and as fast interconnects between components inside future exaflop-scale supercomputers.