Lifeboat Foundation

A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable – enough bandwidth to download 230 million photographs in that time, and more traffic than travels through the entire internet’s backbone network per second.

Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues have used a photonic chip – a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips – to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels and transmit them all at once over 7.9 kilometres.

First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This “frequency comb” of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core.