Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/23/pipe_the_fattening/

Huge fat pipe squirts mighty streams

Magnificent 35-kilowrist performance

By Lewis Page

Posted in Networks, 23rd May 2011 11:41 GMT

An allied team of boffins based in Blighty, Germany, Switzerland and Israel say they have broken the record for data transmission rate from a single light source, using just one laser to send info at a blistering 26 terabits per second.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest line rate ever encoded onto a single light source," write the scientists, with pardonable smugness.

Even greater data rates have been achieved down a single fibre, but the trouble with these previous efforts is that they require the use of many lasers all squirting light into the pipe at different frequencies (colours). This means a lot of kit and a lot of power consumption.

The new technique involves using just one laser to create hundreds of colours at once, all of which can carry a stream of information. The data is combined and then separated out again at the other end using optical methods to implement a tricky piece of mathematics - the Fourier transform which some readers may recall from university days - extremely fast.

The scientists carrying out the experiment consider that pipe of multiterabit fatness will soon be routinely required by "new services such as cloud computing, three-dimensional high-definition television and virtual-reality applications". They think that their Fourier-transform rig could perhaps be integrated onto a chip, so making it a candidate for commercial use.

As the Beeb notes:


But that's not what the internet of the future will be used for. It will, like the internet of today, probably be used mainly for pornography.

So: just how much smut could be handled by the new, unprecedentedly fat pipe?

Well, it's difficult to say in terms of hi-def 3D as there isn't much such content about yet. Let's instead go with a demanding present-day format: uncompressed 1080p HD video, which requires 746 megabits/sec. The profs' single laser, employed as a smut hose, would thus be able to simultaneously satisfy the demands of no less than 34,852 filth-hungry onanists - it is a 34.8 kilowrist pipe, in Reg units.

That's impressive.

The boffinry writeup on the new tech can be found here (subscription required) published by Nature Photonics. ®