Connected at speeds users only dream of

The Tyndall institute in Cork has produced a two terabit per second connection – the stuff of dreams, writes MARIE BORAN

A RECENT breakthrough at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork is the equivalent of the Harry Potterbus that magically compresses itself to fit in impossibly tight spaces. It is the world's first two terabit per second (2Tb/s) ethernet transmission demonstration within optical fibres.

This is blisteringly fast, says Prof Andrew Ellis, senior research fellow at the Photonic Systems Group in the institute. Over a connection like this you could download 100 2GB (gigabyte) high-definition movies in a single second.

“Most consumers would dream of having a 1GB connection. This experiment is 1,000 times faster than their wildest dreams,” he says.

It’s not the kind of broadband connection that the average consumer would ever need but it is exactly where large corporations such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are headed in terms of transporting data out of and between their vast data centres.

Facebook, as a cloud provider, has already talked about the need for 1Tb/s ethernet and specifically mentioned “spectral efficiency” as a challenge.

Tyndall’s novel technique actually uses spectral efficiency to make better use of the bandwidth, explains Dr Paul Gunning, network technology expert with BT who is collaborating with the institute on this research.

BT has custom-built a 124km loop of its standard optical fibre that runs between the institute in Cork city and Clonakilty to perform these 2Tb/s experiments.

“The length of this loop is perfect for BT because it corresponds to the average distances between many cities in Ireland and the UK. If we can transport data at 2Tb/s here, we can replicate it anywhere,” says Dr Gunning.

Tyndall’s technique is great for squeezing bandwidth because it makes use of colours within the optical spectrum.

When light is shone through a prism, it splits into different colours, explains Prof Ellis.

Each colour on the spectrum can transmit data and the institute has achieved a world first by overlapping these colours to pack more data in without compromising its integrity.

“It’s a bit like suddenly being able to increase the capacity of the main road between Dublin and Cork by building multiple roads on top of one another,” says |Dr Gunning.

There are other aspects to the institute’s technology. At such transfer speeds, errors can creep in, explains Dr Gunning. Using a technique called “forward error correction” the institute can detect and correct for these errors as data flies at breakneck speed.

In addition, the 124kms of optical fibre has been developed to act as its own amplifier and boost the signal.

This kind of speed will trickle down to consumers and business users because everything is headed towards the cloud, says Dr Gunning.

“Increasingly all of our data is not being held on a desktop or local server but instead in vast data centres like Amazon and Google. The cloud isn’t down the road from you; it could be on another continent.

Not only is our data – from Dropbox file to Gmail attachments – being stored and accessed on these mammoth data centres but it also needs to be replicated almost instantly by these companies.

Imagine all the users accessing this data in real time and you can see how it is starting to consume bandwidth on an internet provider’s core network. This is why BT considers its collaboration with Tyndall to be essential future proofing as the cloud continues to grow.

Since the establishment of the institute in 2003 a team of two to three researchers has been working full time on spectral efficiency, which has culminated in this breakthrough – 2Tb/s data transfer over ethernet. While the institute’s technology is unique, the speed limit has recently been surpassed by researchers in Japan.

Prof Ellis says plans for the future involve developing bigger and better speeds. “We’d like to take the record back.”