Fastest data in the world

As IT updates go, this was about as nerve wracking as it gets.

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

Suddenly, text on a black background appeared on the screen in front of them. It worked. “There was bragging,” recalls Joachim Opdenakker of SURF, a Dutch IT association that works for educational and research institutions. “It was super-cool to see.

He and his colleague Edwin Verheul have just established a new data link between the LHC in Switzerland and data repositories in the Netherlands.

A data connection that could reach speeds of 800 gigabits per second (Gbps) – more than 11,000 times the average UK home broadband speed. The goal is to improve scientists’ access to the results of experiments at the LHC.

A subsequent test in March using special equipment on loan from Nokia proved that the required speeds were achievable.

“This transponder that Nokia uses is like a celebrity,” says Mr Verheul, explaining how the set is pre-booked for use in various locations. “We had limited time to conduct tests. If you have to delay a week, then the transponder is gone.’

This amount of bandwidth, approaching one terabit per second, is extremely fast, but some submarine cables are even several hundred times faster – they use multiple strands of fiber to achieve that speed.

In labs around the world, network experts are coming up with fiber-optic systems capable of transmitting data even faster than this. They reach extraordinary speeds of many petabits per second (Pbps), or 300 million times faster than the average UK home broadband connection.

This is so fast that one can hardly imagine how people will use such bandwidth in the future. But the 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, stretching from Geneva to Paris, then Brussels and finally Amsterdam. Part of the challenge in achieving 800 Gbps was radiating pulses of light that far. “With distance, the power levels of this light decrease, so you have to amplify it in different places,” explains Mr. Opdenakker.

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

This is slimmed down for storage and study, but still requires a significant amount of bandwidth. Additionally, with an upgrade by 2029, the LHC expects to produce even more scientific data than today.

“The upgrade increases collisions by at least a factor of five,” says James Watt, Nokia’s senior vice president and general manager of optical networks.

However, the time when 800 Gbps seems slow may not be far off. In November, a team of researchers in Japan broke the world record for data transfer speeds, reaching an astonishing 22.9 Pbps. That’s enough bandwidth to supply every single person on the planet, and then a few billion more, with a Netflix stream, says Chigo Okonkwo of Eindhoven University of Technology, who participated in the work.

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

He also adds that the system he and his colleagues used relied on multiple cores — a total of 19 cores inside a single optical cable. This is a new type of cable, unlike the standard ones that connect many people’s homes to the Internet.

But older fiber is expensive to dig up and replace. Extending its lifespan is useful, says Wladek Forysiak of Aston University in the UK. He and colleagues recently achieved speeds of around 402 terabits per second (Tbps) along a 50 km optical fiber with just one core. That’s about 5.7 million times faster than the average home broadband connection in the UK.

“I think it’s the best in the world, we don’t know of any better results,” says prof. Forysiak. Their technique relies on using more wavelengths of light than normal when data flashes down an optical line.

To do this, they use alternative forms of electronic equipment that transmit and receive signals over fiber optic cables, but such a setup might be easier to install than replacing thousands of miles of cable itself.

But reliability may be even more important than speed for some applications. “For remote robotic surgery 3,000 miles away … you absolutely don’t want any network outage scenario,” says Mr. Creaner.

Dr Okonkwo adds that training AI will increasingly require moving huge datasets. The faster it can be done, the better, he says.

And Ian Phillips, who works alongside Professor Forysiak, says bandwidth tends to find applications once it’s available: “Humanity will find a way to use it.”

Although more petabits per second is far beyond what today’s web users need, Lane Burdette, a research analyst at TeleGeography, a telecommunications market research firm, says it’s striking how fast bandwidth demand is growing — currently approximately 30% year-on-year on transatlantic fiber optic cables.

Content delivery – social media, cloud services, video streaming – is taking up much more bandwidth than before, he notes: “In early 2010, it was about 15% of international bandwidth. Now it is up to three quarters, 75%. It’s absolutely massive.”

Andrew Kernahan, head of public affairs for the Internet Service Providers Association, says most home users now have gigabit-per-second access.

However, only about a third of broadband customers sign up for such technology. There is currently no “killer app” that really requires it, says Mr Kernahan. This may change as more and more television is consumed over the Internet, for example.

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