The world's fastest data transmission speed record has been broken yet again, paving the road for increasingly instantaneous transmission of the world's entire knowledge repository. The team who achieved this feat are researchers from Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their novel technique leverages a single laser and a single, custom-designed optical chip enabling throughputs to the tune of 1.8 Pbit/s (Petabits per second) — double today's global internet traffic.
For scale, the same data transmission record had been previously broken back in August 2020 with a then-astonishing 178 Tbit/s (Terabits per second) — enough to download Netflix's then-existing catalog in less time than you could count a single Mississippi. But that speed is only around 10% of today's maximum throughput announcement, meaning that in less than three years we've improved the technology tenfold.
