Nokia Promising To Make Current Internet Speeds Look Like Dial Up

A globe with many blue lights around it


A cartoon of a bunch of paper hanging on a line

Think your internet is fast? This week Nokia will unveil a new data transfer technology that promises to offer up to 1TBps or 1000 Gigabits per second! Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs, and the Technical University of Munich are going to show off a new tech called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping that they say can offer these types of high speeds through current existing fiber.

“For comparison this is almost 50,000 times greater than the average speed of a UK broadband connection of 24 megabits per second (Mb/s), which is the current speed defining “superfast†broadband. To give an example, the data rate we have achieved would allow the entire HD Games of Thrones series to be downloaded within one second.â€

— Technical university of Munich

Calling terabit internet overkill is one huge understatement for home users but internet providers and companies(such as Google and Amazon) will greatly benefit from the speeds. Current limites sit at around 40GBps.

“This breakthrough will allow operators and enterprises to improve the distance and capacity of high-speed data transmissions in optical metro and core networks.

â€PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points, the alphabet of the transmission, are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach.â€â€

— Nokia Bell Labs

We still don’t know when this type of technology will be available but the they are saying that the demonstration will be made using real world conditions, not in some high tech laboratory. Its just insane to think that in a few years time we will be looking at Google Fiber as though it were old school dial up.

Sources from: ZDNet and UCL