China announced something hard to imagine just a few years ago: data transmission speeds of 3.2 petabits per second over a single optical fiber. To understand the scale of the test, a comparison is enough. In 2007, mankind had the technological capacity to store about 295 exabytes of information, which is equal to 315 times the estimated number of grains of sand on Earth. The speed achieved by the Chinese researchers would require minutes to transmit the amount of data.
All of humanity in 12 minutes. It happened on October 26, 2026, when the Wuhan-based public group China Information and Communication Technologies (CICT) announced that its researchers were able to transmit 3.2 petabits of data per second through an experimental optical fiber.
The speed equals 400 terabytes per second, for example, enough to transfer more than 20,000 movies in 4K resolution in one second, according to the team’s estimates. This represents the equivalent capacity of 3.2 million 1 Gb/s home connections operating simultaneously. The result exceeded by 28% the 2.5 petabits per second achieved by the same group of researchers a few months earlier.
Humanity’s knowledge, reduced to a number. In 2011, researchers Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez published in the journal Science the first major inventory of the world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and process information between 1986 and 2007. They concluded that, by the end of that time, humanity could already store about 295% of the information, which is already 4% exabited by digital media.
That capacity was equal to about 295 billion gigabytes and 315 times the estimated number of grains of sand on the planet. At 3.2 petabits per second, sending 295 exabytes would require about 737.5 seconds: exactly 12 minutes and 17.5 seconds. And yes, the comparison is theoretical and refers to the world’s storage capacity in 2007, but the general idea puts into context what has been achieved.
The secret is in 24 cores. Because a conventional optical fiber uses a glass core to transport information through light signals. Chinese engineers have created a structure with 24 cores within the same fiber, multiplying the available paths for data transmission without the need for 24 independent cables.
Additionally, they combined three bands of the infrared spectrum, known as S, C, and L, to carry multiple channels of information simultaneously. The main challenge was to avoid interference between cores and manage the different characteristics of each band. They say the test reached a speed of over 10.3 kmph.
A record with a decisive specialty. The collaboration between CICT, Pengcheng Laboratory and Fiberhome Fujikura claims a world record for real-time optical transmission using an architecture compatible with commercial equipment. For “humans” this means that signals are encoded and decoded as they circulate, without relying on further processing performed on laboratory computers.
The distinction is important because Japan has already announced higher speeds in other tests, including 22.9 petabits per second achieved by 2023 by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). The results, however, correspond to different configurations and conditions, so the Chinese 3.2 petabits do not constitute an absolute speed record in fiber optics.
AI needs bigger and bigger highways. elephant in the house The development addresses a rapidly growing need: connecting massive data centers used to train and run artificial intelligence models. These facilities employ thousands of processors that must constantly exchange large amounts of data, and their connectivity capacity can become a bottleneck.
According to CICT engineers, next-generation AI computing centers may require five to ten times more optical fiber than traditional data centers. The technology can also be used in large telecommunication networks and future infrastructures associated with 6G.
The next challenge is outside the laboratory. The researchers demonstrated the operation of their technology at a distance of 10.3 kilometers, enough to study connections between relatively close facilities. But its use in national or international networks requires solving additional problems related to amplifiers, connectors, splices, reliability and manufacturing costs.
Plus: Multicore fibers are still more complex than conventional fibers, and it has not yet been proven that they can be deployed competitively on a large scale. Meanwhile, the Chinese team is already considering reaching 10 petabits per second as its next goal. To give us an idea, at that speed, it would take less than four minutes to transmit a volume equal to the entire storage capacity of humanity in 2007.
Picture | INESC TEC/Wikimedia Commons
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