Two system engineers built an 800-gigabit-per-second connection between the Swiss laboratory of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the world's largest scientific experiment, and the Dutch data warehouse. BBC writes. The connection speed developed by Edwin Verheul and Joachim Opdenacker is about 4,400 times faster. With the current average internet speed in Hungary.
They say such bandwidth is necessary because CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates an astonishing amount of data as particles collide during the experiment (about 200 million gigabits per second), and they wanted to send that data as quickly as possible from space. The Swiss laboratory is in the Dutch databases.
The first successful test was carried out in February, but before that it was necessary to know whether it was possible to implement it at all and whether the system would work. This required special equipment borrowed from Nokia, which they had the opportunity to work with in March. “The Nokia transceiver is like a celebrity. The equipment is pre-booked, so we had a limited time to test, and if we had postponed the experiment by a week, we would have missed it,” said Verheul.
The optical cable from CERN’s headquarters in Switzerland to the Netherlands is 1,650 kilometers long, from Geneva to Paris, then to Brussels and finally to Amsterdam. Part of the challenge of achieving 800 gigabits per second was the need to transmit the light pulses over such a long distance. “Distance reduces the signal strength, so you have to boost the signal in different places,” Opdenacker said.
The world record for the fastest data transfer was broken last November in Japan, where a speed of 22.9 million gigabits per second was achieved in this experiment, which is 127 million times faster than the average Hungarian Internet. According to Chigo Okonkwo, a researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology, who is working on the experiment, it is theoretically possible to stream Netflix to 10 billion people at the same time. This speed has not yet been applied in practice, as the Japanese researchers used a huge amount of experimental data in the experiment, which was sent over a distance of 13 kilometers, and used a unique cable with 19 cores, which is the world record. It was achieved.
More and more new AI-based technologies will require more bandwidth, according to Martin Kreiner, an expert at the Global Broadband Association. Home broadband speeds of 1 gigabit per second are already available in many places, but a significant number of people are not using that speed at the moment. Kreiner expects home bandwidth to reach 50 gigabit per second by 2030.
