ExtraTorrent | BT and Alcatel Tested Broadband of 1.4 Tbps

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Researchers working for BT and Alcatel-Lucent announced that they have created a broadband technology able to hit 1.4 terabits per second. This speed allows downloading 44 HD videos in one second. The most important part is that it can all be done on the existing fiber network in London.

BT researchers explained that they used a so-called “flexigrid” infrastructure, which created a “super channel” consisting of seven 200 Gbps channels. All of them were combined to provide a total capacity of 1.4 tbps. The researchers of BT and Alcatel-Lucent also reduced gaps between the transmission channels and increased their density by 42.5% in the efficiency of data transmission compared with current standard networks.

According to Alcatel-Lucent optical marketing leader, the technique could be compared to decreasing the space between lanes on a busy freeway, which would allow more lanes of traffic to travel on the same road. The researchers conducted the test on a 410-kilometer fiber link between central London and Ipswich last fall. The tech giant believes it could help it to meet consumer and business demand for increased bandwidth.

Unfortunately, this is all still backbone and core network stuff, so it won’t change the speeds you can receive at home – traffic of individual users still has to go through the last mile bottleneck.