Researchers at University College London claim they’ve obtained a new top internet speed of 178Tbps – a fifth quicker than the prior record and fast enough to download the entire Netflix catalog in under a second. To achieve that, the researchers used different bandwidth ranges than are typically used in commercial optical systems. Traditional fiber infrastructure uses bandwidth of 4.5THz with 9THz becoming more available commercially. In UCL experiments, the scientists used 16.8THz.
A black swan event is defined as “an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.” The phrase originated because people assumed that black swans didn’t exist because nobody had recorded seeing one – until finally someone did. It turned out black swans existed but were extremely rare, and it was hard to predict when or where someone would encounter one. The COVID-19 pandemic in some ways has been a black swan event, and the communications sector has been no exception. One impact on our sector is that data traffic has shot up at an unprecedented rate, a result of schools closing and orders to shelter in place and work from home. This experience is one example of a fundamental truth of network design: patterns of demand in data traffic are hard to predict (other than that they will grow rapidly on average). The solution is to focus on building physical access networks that have the capacity to respond to changing demands, and the accessibility to make use of that capacity where and when it is needed.
