Chinese Team Reports 3.2 Pb/s Real-Time Fiber Transmission Record

A research team in China says it transmitted data at 3.2 petabits per second (Pb/s) through a 24-core optical fiber, setting a new real-time transmission record. The result exceeds the team’s earlier 2.5 Pb/s record, reported earlier this year using similar technology.

The project brought together specialists from the National Key Laboratory of Optical Communication Technology, China Information and Communication Technologies Group, Pengcheng Laboratory, and Fiberhome Fujikura Fiber Optic Technology. The system combined spatial division multiplexing, which carries separate data streams in one fiber, with S+C+L multi-band transmission across different wavelength ranges.

The researchers said the combination posed engineering challenges, including interference between neighboring channels and differing specifications across the three wavelength bands. They reported achieving the result with hardware architectures described as compliant with commercial requirements, operating continuously in real time.

A Hubei provincial government website compared the capacity with about 3.2 million households using separate 1 Gbps connections at once. The report also said the rate could theoretically transfer more than 20,000 4K movies in one second. These are capacity comparisons, not evidence that households could receive those speeds through ordinary broadband.

The result is below a 5.29 Pb/s transmission reported in laboratory research using comparable multi-core fiber. The source says those experiments may depend on specialized equipment and processing. It also reports no official deployment schedule, pricing information, or independent assessment of sustained everyday performance for the Chinese team’s system.