- Future networks could carry petabit -speeds without new cable forms
- Standard diameter fiber hits the milestone with capacity distance in laboratory test
- The US average internet speed is dwarfed by pierced optical transmission
Buried under the city streets, landscape roads and the deep seabed are the glass threads that carry almost everything we do online.
These threads, often not wider than a human hair, are already moving astonishing amounts of data, and now Japanese scientists have pushed these limits further – without changing the shape or size of the cable.
A team led by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), which works with Sumitomo Electric and European Collaborators, has achieved a transmission speed of 1.02 Petabits per year. Second over 1,808 kilometers.
A new world record
The test used a 19-core optical fiber with a standard clothing diameter of 0.125 mm, which means it is the same thickness as single-core fibers already deployed in networks around the world.
Instead of requiring brand new infrastructure, the cable presses 19 separate light paths into the room typically used for one.
It allows for a dramatic jump in capacity while remaining compatible with existing systems.
It also marks the first time that a petabit-class signal has raised more than 1,000 kilometers in a standard size fiber.
The result sets a new world record for capacity distance product to 1.86 emissions per year. Second mile.
To simulate a long -distance backbone, signals the loop was 21 times through 86.1 km of spen of the new fiber. Amplifiers increased the signal at each passport and were carefully set to work across both C and L -waves length bands for all 19 cores.
Using 180 wavelengths modulated by 16qam, the system was able to handle huge amounts of parallel data flows.
After erecting the simulated route, the signals were separated by a multi -channel recipient using MIMO Digital Signal Processing.
This avoided adding more fiber kernels or expanding the cable diameter, which would have made the integration with current networks harder.
To put the new performance in context, the average US broadband speed in early 2025 is about 290 Mbps. The new record of 1.02 petabits per Second equals 1,020,000,000 Mbps – more than 3.5 million times faster.
The results were presented on the OFC 2025 as a post-deadline paper that offers a glimpse of what future optical networks can look like.
While it will not transform work or home connections overnight, research shows how far standard fiber can still go. The team is now aiming to refine reinforcement efficiency and signal treatment to move closer to the real world.
As global data traffic continues to grow, progresses as this way of stretching infrastructure further without having to dig new trenches.
