Recently, University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom stated that the school’s team of engineers has achieved a data transfer rate of 178 megabits per second (178,000,000 megabits per second). This speed is close to the theoretical limit value of data transmission set by the American mathematician Claude Shannon in 1949, and it is also the fastest data transmission rate in the world, one-fifth faster than the world record held by the Japanese team.

The world record is achieved by optical fiber transmission, which is twice the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world (the limited spectrum bandwidth used by the current infrastructure is 4.5THz, of which the bandwidth of commercial systems entering the market is 9THz, while the bandwidth used by researchers is 16.8THz).

The advantage of this technology is that by upgrading the amplifiers located on the optical fiber path at intervals of 40-100km, they can be deployed cost-effectively on the existing infrastructure (the cost of upgrading the amplifier is 16,000 pounds, while the cost of installing new optical fibers in urban areas is 450,000 pounds per kilometer).