The fastest data in the world – BBC News

For IT updates, this was the most nerve-wracking thing there was.

In February, deep in a warehouse at Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s largest scientific experiment—two network engineers held their breath. And pressed a button.

Suddenly, text appeared on a black background on a screen in front of them. It had worked. “There were high fives,” recalls Joachim Opdenakker of SURF, a Dutch IT association that supports educational and research institutions. “It was super cool to see.”

Together with his colleague Edwin Verheul, he had just set up a new data connection between the LHC in Switzerland and data storage locations in the Netherlands.

A data link capable of reaching speeds of 800 gigabits per second (Gbps) – or more than 11,000 times the average UK broadband speed. The idea is to improve scientists’ access to the results of LHC experiments.

A further test in March using special equipment loaned by Nokia proved that the desired speeds were achievable.

“This transponder that Nokia uses is like a celebrity,” says Mr. Verheul, explaining how the kit has been reserved in advance for use at various locations. “We had limited time to do tests. If you have to delay a week, the transponder is gone.”

This amount of bandwidth, which amounts to almost one terabit per second, is extremely fast, but some undersea cables are hundreds of times faster: they use multiple fiber optic strands to achieve such speeds.

In labs around the world, networking experts are devising fibre optic systems that can move data even faster, reaching extraordinary speeds of many petabits per second (Pbps), or 300 million times the average UK broadband connection.

This is so fast that it is hard to imagine how people will use such bandwidth in the future. But engineers are wasting no time in proving that it is possible. And they just want to go faster.

The duplex cable (with cores that either transmit or receive) from CERN to data centers in the Netherlands is just under 1,650 km (1,025 miles) long, winding from Geneva to Paris, then Brussels and finally Amsterdam. Part of the challenge in reaching 800 Gbps was sending light pulses over such a long distance. “The power of that light decreases over distance, so you have to amplify it at different locations,” Mr. Opdenakker explains.

Every time a tiny subatomic particle collides with another during experiments at the LHC, the impact generates staggering amounts of data – about one petabyte per second. That’s enough to fill 220,000 DVDs.

This has been scaled down for storage and study, but still requires significant amounts of bandwidth. Furthermore, with an upgrade planned for 2029, the LHC is expected to produce even more scientific data than it does today.

“The upgrade increases the collision rate by at least a factor of five,” said James Watt, senior vice president and general manager of optical networks at Nokia.

A time when 800 Gbps seems slow may not be far off, however. In November, a team of researchers in Japan broke the world speed record for data transmission when they achieved an astonishing 22.9 Pbps. That’s enough bandwidth to feed every person on the planet, and then some billion more, a Netflix stream, says Chigo Okonkwo of Eindhoven University of Technology, who was involved in the work.

In this case, a meaningless but massive stream of pseudorandom data was bundled over 13 km of coiled fiber optic cable in a laboratory environment. Dr. Okonkwo explains that the integrity of the data is analyzed after transmission to confirm that it was sent as quickly as reported without accumulating too many errors.

He adds that the system he and his colleagues used relied on multiple cores — a total of 19 cores in a single fiber optic cable. This is a new type of cable, different from the standard cables that connect many people’s homes to the internet.

But older fiber is expensive to dig up and replace. Extending its lifespan is a good thing, argues Wladek Forysiak of Aston University in the U.K. He and colleagues recently achieved speeds of about 402 terabits per second (Tbps) over a 50km-long single-core fiber. That’s about 5.7 million times faster than the average British home broadband connection.

“I think it’s a world record, we don’t know of any results that are better than that,” says Prof Forysiak. Their technique is based on using more wavelengths of light than normal when flashing data down an optical line.

To do this, they use alternative forms of electronic equipment that send and receive signals via fiber optic cables. However, such a setup could be easier to install than replacing thousands of kilometers of cable yourself.

But reliability may be even more important than speed for some applications. “For remote robotic surgery over 3,000 miles … you absolutely don’t want a scenario where the network goes down,” Mr. Creaner says.

Dr. Okonkwo adds that training AI increasingly requires moving huge datasets around. The faster this can be done, the better, he argues.

And Ian Phillips, who works with Prof Forysiak, says bandwidth tends to find uses once it becomes available: “Humanity finds a way to consume it.”

While several petabits per second is far beyond what today’s Internet users need, Lane Burdette, a research analyst at TeleGeography, a telecom market research firm, says it’s remarkable how quickly demand for bandwidth is growing. Demand is currently running at about 30 percent year-over-year for transatlantic fiber optic cables.

Content delivery – social media, cloud services, video streaming – is consuming much more bandwidth than it used to, she notes: “It used to be about 15% of international bandwidth in the early 2010s. Now it’s three-quarters, 75%. It’s absolutely massive.”

Andrew Kernahan, chief public affairs officer at the Internet Service Providers Association, says most home users can now reach gigabit-per-second speeds.

However, only about a third of broadband customers are signing up for such technology. There is currently no “killer app” that really needs it, says Mr Kernahan. This could change as more TV is consumed over the internet, for example.

“It’s definitely a challenge to get the message across and make people more aware of what they can do with the infrastructure,” he says.