NYC

Remember that pair of 100 terabit-per-second connections we told you about earlier this moth? Impressive? Sure, but not entirely practical thanks to the massive banks of lasers (370 to be exact) that guzzled several kilowatts of electricity. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany haven't hit 100Tbps yet, but they were able push 26Tbps using just one, lonely laser. The new single-laser fiber-optic speed record was set using a technique called fast Fourier transform that pulses light at an incredibly high rate with data encoded in 325 distinct colors across the spectrum. A detector at the receiving end is able to distinguish between the various colored data streams, based on tiny differences in arrival time, and recombine them into a high-speed torrent of ones and zeros. The scientists behind the project believe that, eventually, the technology could make its way into commercial use and be integrated into silicon chips. Now, someone needs to hurry up an...

Even a woman with a 40 Gbps internet connection might feel a twinge of jealousy at this news -- Japan has successfully tested  two   separate 100 terabit per second data links that use a single optical fiber to carry their loads.  New Scientist  reports that NEC scholars stuffed the light from 370 lasers into 165 kilometers of fiber to achieve a speed of 101.7 Tbps, while NICT researchers set a new record of 109 Tbps using a special fiber with seven cores to manage the trick. We imagine that Alcatel-Lucent and NTTaren't sitting still. Not that we really care who has the fastest fiber... just so long as one end leads to our house. New Scientist

Good news for anyone feeling left behind by the broadband revolution just because of their post code:Fujitsu has just announced a joint venture to deliver fiber optic connectivity to neglected rural homes in the UK. Built on hardware provided by Cisco and supported by Virgin Media and TalkTalk, this network will focus on channeling fiber directly to the home, which is said to provide symmetrical 1Gbps bandwidth with up to 10Gbps speeds considered possible down the line. Best news of all, perhaps, is that the cabling will be available on a wholesale basis to all ISPs, not just the ones involved in the project, so the UK may finally get a decent taste of what competition in the internet service space feels like. Alas, there's a key line in the press release that notes the new venture is dependent on BT providing "access to its underground ducts and telegraph poles on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," which it apparently isn't doing at the moment. Ah well, ...