Researchers create 26 terabit-per-second connections with only a single laser

Keep in mind that pair of 100 terabit-per-second connections we told you about earlier this moth? Impressive? Sure, but not entirely practical due to the big banks of lasers (370 to be exact) that guzzled several kilowatts of electricity. Researchers on the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany haven’t hit 100Tbps yet, but they were able push 26Tbps using only one, lonely laser. The recent single-laser fiber-optic speed record was set using a methodology called fast Fourier transform that pulses light at a really high rate with data encoded in 325 distinct colors around the spectrum. A detector on the receiving end is in a position to distinguish between some of the colored data streams, in accordance with tiny differences in arrival time, and recombine them right into a high-speed torrent of ones and zeros. The scientists behind the project believe that, eventually, the technology can make its way into commercial use and be integrated into silicon chips. Now, someone must hurry up and jack our FiOS connection into this thing — all this talk of terabits-per-second and graphene modulators , yet we’re still jealous of grandma Löthberg .