Japanese engineers have set a new record for data transfer speeds over a single fiber optic cable — 22.9 petabits per second or 22.9 million Gbit/s.

This is about 20 times the total Internet traffic in the world that is transmitted every second.

Thus, representatives of the Land of the Rising Sun more than doubled the previous world record of 10.66 Pbit/s. The information was transmitted over a distance of 13 km.

To achieve this result, researchers at the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (NICT) simultaneously used a cable with a large number of fiber optic cores and advanced multiplexing technologies. The engineers were able to combine spatial division multiplexing (SDM), multi-band wavelength multiplexing (WDM) and multicore fiber data transmission (MCF) technology. Previously, this was possible for cables with four cores or for short distances (up to 1 km).

A special multiband MIMO receiver was used to connect multiband WDM and SDM with optical fiber with a large number of spatial channels (for example, 114 channels in a 38-core 3-mode fiber).

According to the engineers, the achieved data transfer rate could be higher with more optimized encoding — up to 24.7 Pbit/s.

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