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As far as IT updates go, it’s been as nerve wracking as can be.

In February, deep in a warehouse at Cern, the Swiss home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world’s largest science experiment – ​​two network engineers held their breath. And he pressed a button.

Suddenly, text on a black background appeared on the screen in front of them. It had worked. “There was a high five,” recalls Joachim Opdenacker of SURF, a Dutch IT association that works for educational and research institutions. “It was great to see.”

He and his colleague Edwin Verheul had just established a new data link between the LHC in Switzerland and data storage sites in the Netherlands.

A data connection that can reach speeds of 800 gigabits per second (Gbps) – or more than 11,000 times the average UK home broadband speed. The idea is to improve scientists’ access to the results of the LHC experiments.

A subsequent test in March using special equipment borrowed from Nokia proved that the desired speeds were achievable.

“This transponder that Nokia uses is like a celebrity,” says Mr Verheul, explaining how the kit is booked for use in various locations in advance. “We had limited time to do tests. If you have to delay a week, the transponder is gone.’

This bandwidth, approaching one terabit per second, is extremely fast, but some submarine cables are even several hundred times faster – they use multiple strands of fiber to achieve such speeds.

In labs around the world, networking experts are devising optical systems capable of transmitting data even faster than that. They reach incredible speeds of many petabits per second (Pbps), or 300 million times the average UK home broadband connection.

This is so fast that one can hardly imagine how people will use such bandwidth in the future. But engineers wasted no time in proving that it was possible. And they just want to go faster.

The duplex cable (with cores that send or receive) from Cern to data centers in the Netherlands is just over 1,650 km (I025 miles) long, winding from Geneva to Paris, then Brussels and finally Amsterdam. Part of the challenge in reaching 800 Gbps was sending light pulses over such a long path. “Because of the distance, the power levels of this light decrease, so you have to amplify it in different places,” explains Mr. Opdenacker.

Every time one tiny subatomic particle smashes into another during experiments at the LHC, the impact generates staggering amounts of data—about one petabyte per second. That’s enough to fill 220,000 DVDs.

This is scaled down for storage and research, but still requires massive amounts of bandwidth. Plus, with an upgrade expected by 2029, the LHC expects to produce even more scientific data than it does today.

“The upgrade increases the number of collisions by at least a factor of five,” said James Watt, senior vice president and general manager of optical networks at Nokia.

The time when 800 Gbps seems slow may not be far off, however. In November, a team of researchers in Japan broke the world data rate record when they reached an astonishing 22.9 Pbps. That’s enough bandwidth to supply every single person on the planet, and then a few billion more, with a Netflix stream, says Chigo Okonkwo of Eindhoven University of Technology, who is involved in the work.

In this case, a meaningless but massive stream of pseudo-random data was broadcast over 13 kilometers of coiled fiber optic cable in a laboratory setting. Dr. Okonkwo explains that data integrity is analyzed after transfer to confirm that it was sent as quickly as reported without accumulating too many errors.

He also adds that the system he and his colleagues used relies on multiple cores — a total of 19 cores in a single optical cable. This is a new type of cable unlike the standard ones that connect many people’s homes to the Internet.

But older fibers are expensive to dig up and replace. Extending its life is beneficial, says Vladek Forysiak of Aston University in the UK. He and his colleagues recently achieved speeds of about 402 terabits per second (Tbps) over a 50-kilometer optical fiber with just one core. That’s around 5.7 million times faster than the average home broadband connection in the UK.

“I think it’s the best in the world, we don’t know of results that are better than this,” says Prof. Forysiak. Their technique relies on using more wavelengths of light than usual when flashing data over an optical line.

To do this, they use alternative forms of electronic equipment that send and receive signals over fiber optic cables, but such a setup can be easier to install than replacing thousands of kilometers of cable itself.

But reliability may be even more important than speed for some applications. “For remote robotic surgery 3,000 miles away … you absolutely don’t want a scenario where the network goes down,” says Mr. Kreiner.

Dr. Okonkwo adds that training AI will increasingly require crunching huge data sets. The sooner this can be done, the better, he argues.

And Ian Phillips, who works alongside Prof Forysiak, says bandwidth tends to find uses once it’s available: “Humanity finds a way to consume it.”

Although a few petabits per second are far beyond what today’s web users need, Lane Burdett, a research analyst at TeleGeography, a telecommunications market research firm, says it’s striking how quickly demand for bandwidth is growing — currently around 30% year-on-year on transatlantic fiber optic cables.

Content delivery – social media, cloud services, video streaming – is eating up a lot more bandwidth than before, she notes: “At the beginning of 2010, it was about 15% of international bandwidth. Now it’s up to three-quarters, 75%. This is absolutely massive.

Andrew Kernahan, head of public affairs at the Internet Service Providers Association, says most home users already have access to gigabit-per-second speeds.

However, only about a third of broadband customers sign up for such technology. There is currently no “killer app” that really requires it, says Mr Kernahan. This may change as more and more television is consumed over the Internet, for example.

“There’s definitely a challenge to get the message out and make people more aware of what they can do with infrastructure,” he says.