The internet of the future could download Red Dead Redemption 2 in nanoseconds

Date:
Thu, 19 Jan 2023 15:42:15 +0000

Description:
10 million Gigabit internet is real, but definitely not coming to an ISP near you anytime soon

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Get ready for blisteringly fast internet, folks. But dont rush; youve got plenty of time to prepare for it. A team of researchers in Europe has developed a new way to transmit data at speeds that dwarf the fastest
internet connections in the world - and theyve done so using just a simple chip and light beam.

The team - comprised of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden - designed a system that uses a photonic chip to split a beam of light into more than 8,000 different color frequencies, with each color isolated and used as a separate medium for carrying data.

The technology, which the researchers call a frequency comb, achieved a staggering speed of 1.8 petabits per second in testing. A petabit is equal to one million gigabits, or 125,000 gigabytes in real-world terms. In other words, the experiment reached an effective data transfer speed of 1,800,000,000Mbps.

To put that into perspective, the average internet speed in Monaco (which has the fastest internet in the world as of 2023) is 262Mbps. Thats just 0.0000146% of the speeds achieved by the Danish-Swedish team; the global average is even less, only 69.14Mbps.

If youre lucky enough to work for NASA , you could take advantage of the
space agencys private shadow network ESnet, which can reportedly reach speeds up to 91,000Mbps - still a minute fraction of the speed the frequency comb
can achieve via less than a single square millimeter of optic cabling. Look, this diagram doesn't mean much to us. If you have a scientific background, perhaps you can make sense of it. (Image credit: Technical University of Denmark, Chalmers University of Technology) Analysis: This is seriously impressive, but dont get too excited

Now, petabit internet speeds have been achieved in the past; as reported by NewScientist , the previous record for optical data transmission was actually 10.66 petabits per second, but this required a ton of bulky equipment. This new solution is far more compact, but more importantly, its scalable .

What that means is that the technology could be feasibly shrunk down to the size of a matchbox, and should theoretically be able to achieve massively faster speeds once the hardware is perfected.

Asbjrn Arvad Jrgensen, one of the researchers, claimed that Our calculations show thatwith the single chip made by Chalmers University of Technology, and
a single laserwe will be able to transmit up to 100 Pbit/s. Let that sink in for a minute. If Google can't sort out widespread fiber internet, what hope does this gaggle of Danes and Swedes have? (Image credit: Google) Faster than speed

100 petabits per second is an absolutely ludicrous internet speed. We mean ludicrous ; we did some math on this one to prove it. Red Dead Redemption 2
is one of the most popular games on Steam right now, and its also one of the biggest, packing a hefty 120GB file size.

With a 100Pbit/s internet connection, you could download the entire game in about 9600 nanoseconds; less than a millisecond, just 0.0000096 seconds. That is wild - this writer lives in a fairly remote rural area with no fiber-optic coverage, where itll take most of an afternoon to download a game like RDR2. Just picturing those kinds of internet speeds sends us into spasms of
ecstasy.

Of course, were not really going to have 1000Pbit/s internet any time soon. Apart from anything else, your practical internet speed - i.e., how fast you can actually download stuff - will always be limited to the speed of your computers drive; if youre still rocking a crusty old HDD, you cant expect transfer speeds in excess of 200MB/s. Even the fastest drives right now (PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs) cap out at around 13,000MB/s.

Thats an obstacle that will take a long time to surpass, but its not even the only issue. Although Jrgensen and his team claim that the tech is scalable
and implementable, it would also require a degree of infrastructure development on a massive scale that simply isnt happening fast enough. If it was, wed all have NASAs internet by now.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-internet-of-the-future-could-download-red-d ead-redemption-2-in-nanoseconds


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