Researchers have used a single laser to transmit data at a 26 terabits per second over an optical fiber cable, a data-transmission breakthrough that promises to come in useful for cloud computing and 3D TV transmissions.
The transmission is biggest volume of data ever carried by a laser beam, according to the group of scientists, led by Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. With the demonstration, which sent the equivalent of 200,000 high-resolution images across 50 kilometers in one second, the researchers said they had broken their own record of 10Tbps, set in 2010.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest line rate ever encoded onto a single light source," the researchers said in an announcement yesterday.
