MELBOURNE: A team of researchers from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities claims to have achieved the world’s fastest communication speed from a single optical chip, at 44.2Tbps through 76.6km of optical fibres across Melbourne. This was achieved replacing 80 separate infrared lasers with a single device they call a micro-comb.

The team says its findings, published in Nature Communications, have the potential to revolutionise telecommunications around the world.

One of the leaders of the research team, distinguished professor Arnan Mitchell from RMIT, said: “Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fibre links with minimal cost.

“Initially, these would be attractive for ultra-high-speed communications between datacentres. 

“However, we could imagine this technology becoming sufficiently low cost and compact that it could be deployed for commercial use by the general public in cities across the world.” – Stuart Corner