Increasing the speed of Internet traffic is becoming more and more important as online games, digital music, and video downloads have become more popular than ever, thus creating a need for faster transmission rates. Therefore German technology firm Siemens claims to have set a new speed record for moving data through a fiber-optic line. Siemens said it had pushed data through network pipes at a speed of 107 Gbps, over a single optical channel in a 100-mile-long U.S. network, which is some 2.5 times faster than a previous network speed record. The new record is roughly equivalent to moving two full DVDs per second over the lines.

According to Siemens in order to increase the speed of transmissions you have to process the data more efficiently before and after it is converted into optical signals. Until this point, to achieve very high data rates, signals had to be split into multiple lower data rate signals and later reconverted from optical signals to electrical signals to avoid data bottlenecks. Siemens' new system rearranges that process so that the signal does not have to be split into multiple streams, and, according to Rainer H. Derksen, project coordinator at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, increases performance enormously.

Siemens expects that the first products based on the new prototype will be available on the market within a few years.

written by Robert M.