Technology

Improved hardware can send ten times as much data through existing fibre-optic cables, potentially providing a way to massively upgrade the internet's infrastructure without the cost and inconvenience of laying any new cables

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Team member Ronit Sohanpal works on the high-speed data transmission set up

UCL

A new speed record has been set for data transmission through an existing, commercially installed fibre-optic cable, with 450 terabits per second – or 450,000,000,000,000 bits per second – being beamed through a pair of cables underneath London’s busy streets.

Polina Bayvel at University College London and her colleagues achieved the record using existing fibre-optic cables running from their laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data centre in Canary Wharf, then back again.…