Information speed record: 1 trillion bits per second

17 Jun 2002

Three separate groups of researchers have succeeded for the first time in transmitting information at a rate of 1 trillion bits per second through an optical fiber. The achievement is the equivalent of transmitting the contents of 300 years' worth of daily newspapers in a single second, or conveying 12 million telephone conversations simultaneously.

The experiments were carried out by Fujitsu Ltd., the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., and a team from AT&T; Research and Lucent Technologies, both of which were formerly parts of Bell Laboratories. The results were reported on Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 1996 in San Jose, Calif.

Reaching a transmission of one trillion bits, or a terabit, "has been considered the Holy Grail of high-capacity transmission experiments," said Andrew Chraplyvy, an author of the AT&T; paper and co-chair of the technical program at the conference. "It was expected that the terabit threshold would be reached in 1999 or 2000. It is quite stunning that three companies have reached that target in 1996."

The results achieved by the three groups are two and a half times as fast as the previous experimental record of 400 billion bits a second, which NTT Laboratories achieved last year, and 400 times faster than the fastest commercial systems in use today. Systems with capacities of 10-to-20 gigabits per second are expected to be deployed this year.