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Researchers at Nokia have managed to successfully reach stable internet speeds of up to one terabit per second by using a new transmission technique... Nokia Fiber Breakthrough Could Mean Terabit Download Speeds For All

Researchers at Nokia have managed to successfully reach stable internet speeds of up to one terabit per second by using a new transmission technique for data.

In real terms that makes the Nokia effort about one thousand time faster than Google’s own fiber broadband, currently rated for a maximum one gigabit per second.

Google Fiber can currently download a full HD movie in around two minutes. Nokia’s new method could do the same things, but in just a matter of seconds.

Google fiber is also currently only available to a limited number of users, and in very specific and localised geographical areas. Nokia’s internet breakthrough could make terabit connections available to anyone with a fiber connection.

The new technique has been pioneered in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs, and Nokia’s own Bell Labs. It uses a technique known as quadrature amplitude modulation, QAM for short, to achieve the increased data transmission rate.

On a really positive note, QAM can use existing fiber hardware and infrastructure to achieve the terabit speeds, and can send it over greater distances without the need to upgrade existing networks.

“Future optical networks not only need to support orders of magnitude higher capacity, but also the ability to dynamically adapt to channel conditions and traffic demand. Probabilistic Constellation Shaping offers great benefits to service providers and enterprises by enabling optical networks to operate closer to the Shannon Limit to support massive datacentre interconnectivity and provide the flexibility and performance required for modern networking in the digital era,” said Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia CTO.

What’s even better news however, are the words of Professor Gerhard Kramer who has been involved with the creation of the QAM technique since its conception, who said that the new technology had been tested under real world conditions, and not just in a science lab.