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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Society has an insatiable desire for data. In fact, it is rather astonishing to think that average Internet traffic is several hundred terabits per second and consumes about eight percent of our electricity production. All of that for instant cat videos—and our desire for new cat videos is apparently insatiable, driving the need for more capacity and even more energy.

[...] The fiber that transported the signal consists of 30 light-guiding cores, surrounded by a single cladding. That means that each core is capable of transporting data at a rate of 25Tbps, bringing us to a grand total of 768Tbps. That, however, is the raw data rate. Data is always transmitted with some redundancy to allow for errors to be corrected, called forward error correction. Once redundancy is accounted for, the net data transfer rate is 661Tbps.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/661tbits-through-a-single-optical-fiber-the-mind-boggles/

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