Scientists continue to blow through data transmission records, with the fastest transmission of information between a laser and a single optical chip system now set at 1.8 petabits per second. That’s well in excess of the amount of traffic passing across the entire internet each second.

Here’s another comparison: the average broadband download speed in the US is 167 megabits per second. You need 1,000 megabits to get to a gigabit, and then 1 million gigabits to get up to 1 petabit.

No matter how you present it, 1.8 petabits is a serious amount of data to transmit in a second.

Researchers in Europe have developed an efficient way to deliver internet speeds at over 1 million gigabits per second through a single chip and laser system.

The experiment achieved a speed of 1.8 petabits per second, or nearly twice the amount of internet traffic the world transmits at the same rate. Amazingly, the feat was pulled off using only a single optical light source.

The research comes from a team at Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Last week, the group published a peer-reviewed paper (Opens in a new window) in Nature Photonics about the technology.

The speed demonstrated by the researchers is equivalent to twice the traffic of the entire global Internet.

The first data transmission to exceed 1 petabit per second (Pbit/s) using only a single laser and a single optical chip has been demonstrated by European researchers.