Speeds of 1.4 terabits per second achieved on ‘commercial grade hardware’

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On the 21st of January, French global communications equipment provider Alcatel-Lucent and British telecommunications services giant British Telecom achieved speeds of 1.4 terabits per second on an existing 410km optical fiber link between the BT tower in London and BT’s adastral park research campus in Suffolk.

For the non-technologically savvy, a terabit is about 0.175 terabytes and a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes. A speed of 1.4 terabits per second is about 44 uncompressed HD movies each second.

A new flexible grid structure was used which increased the density of channels on the optical fibers and achieved up to 42.5 percent greater data efficiency compared to today’s standard networks.

However, Oliver Johnson, CEO of broadband analyst firm Point Topic commented that “Essentially it’s more important for ISPs, and consumers won’t see any immediate benefits, just that their provider will be able to keep up with their demands. Consumers won’t be able to have 1.4 terabits speeds in the near future, certainly not in the next decade.”

While a 1.4Tb/s download speed may still be out of our reach, this is still great news for internet service providers (ISPs) as it means that the existing broadband infrastructure will not have to be changed to meet rising consumer demand for streamed TV shows and movies on services like Netflix. This will mean lower costs for ISPs and hopefully lower prices for consumers.