The internet of the future can download Red Dead Redemption 2 in nanoseconds
Get ready for the super fast internet, folks. But do not rush. You have plenty of time to prepare for it. A team of researchers in Europe Developed a new way to transfer data (Opens in a new tab) faster than the world’s fastest internet connection – and they did it with a simple chip and a beam of light.
The team — made up of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and 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 data transmission.
The technique, which the researchers dubbed “frequency comb,” achieved a staggering 1.8 petabits per second in the test. A petabyte equals one million gigabytes, or 125,000 GB in real terms. In other words, the experiment reached an effective data transfer speed of 1,800,000,000 Mbps.
To put that in perspective, the average Internet speed In Monaco (which has the fastest internet in the world as of 2023) it is 262 Mbps. That’s just 0.0000146% of the speeds achieved by the Danish-Swedish team; The global average is even lower than that, at just 69.14 Mbps.
If you are lucky enough to work NASAyou can take advantage of the space agency’s shadow network ‘ESnet’, which can reach speeds of up to 91,000 megabits per second – still a fraction of the speed that frequency comb can achieve over less than one square millimeter of optical cable.
Analysis: This is really impressive, but don’t get too excited
Now, petabyte internet speeds have been achieved in the past; As mentioned before new world (Opens in a new tab), The previous optical data transmission record was actually 10.66 petabits per second, but this requires a lot of bulky equipment. This new solution is much more compact, but more importantly, it is scalable.
What this means is that the technology can be practically reduced to the size of a matchbox, and should theoretically be able to achieve exponentially higher speeds once the hardware is perfected.
Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen, one of the researchers, claimed that “our calculations show that – using a single chip made by Chalmers University of Technology, and a single laser – we will be able to transmit up to 100 Pbit/s”. Let this sink in for a minute.
faster than speed
100 petabits per second is a pretty ridiculous internet speed. We mean silly; We did some math on this to prove it. Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most popular games on Steam right now, and it’s also one of the largest, with a whopping 120GB file.
With an internet connection of 100 bits/sec, you can download the entire game in about 9,600 nanoseconds; Less than a millisecond, only 0.0000096 seconds. it’s a Wild This writer lives in a fairly remote rural area without fiber coverage where it would take most of an afternoon to download a game like RDR2. Just the visualization of those kinds of internet speeds sends us into fits of euphoria.
Of course, we won’t have a 1,000-bit/s internet anytime soon. Aside from anything else, your practical internet speed—that is, how fast you can download things—will always be limited by the speed of your computer’s drive; If you’re still rocking an old hard drive, you can’t expect transfer speeds over 200MB/s. Even the fastest drives now (PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs) hit around 13,000MB/s.
This is an obstacle that will take a long time to get over, but it is not the only problem. Although Jørgensen and his team claim the technology is scalable and implementable, it also requires a degree of large-scale infrastructure development that simply isn’t happening fast enough. If so, we all have NASA Internet now.