Game of thrones can be downloaded in 1 second !


Optical communications:
                                           Optical communications technology has demonstrated unprecedented development over the past three decades and now stands alone as the enabling technology that underpins the global information infrastructure. Over this period, the throughput (measured in bits per second) of lightwave communications systems increased from 100 Mb/s in 1970 to 10 Tb/s in present day commercial systems, which represents an astonishing 100,000-fold increase. The key technologies that fuelled this surge in capacity were wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), improved fibre types, optical amplification and coherent optical networking. Although the introduction of Erbium and Raman fibre amplifiers negated the need for electronic regenerators and enabled dense WDM transmission, the success and performance of these amplifier technologies has effectively constrained the useable fibre bandwidth (BW) to approximately 10–15 THz, which is now beginning to limit the maximum throughput of optical systems. Within this BW, the throughput can only be increased by reducing the spectral guard bands between WDM carriers, increasing the information rate (IR, measured in bits per symbol) of the modulation format or through new forward error correction (FEC) schemes that require lower redundancy without loss in performance. The combination of these techniques aim to increase the spectral efficiency (SE) of each WDM carrier. However, for Nyquist spaced WDM systems, increasing the SE is highly dependent on the IR, which inherently scales with received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Currently, the upper limit on the available SNR in a coherent optical transmission system, in the absence of fibre nonlinearity, is bounded by the transceiver subsystems.

What does it do with game of thrones ?
                                           Maher and his colleagues combined 15 different channels through which to send the data, and each one carries an optical signal of a different wavelength. Once the information reaches its destination, they’re combined and fed into a single optical receiver with super-high bandwidth for processing. The team dubs this 15 channel system a "super-channel", and it’s the key to hitting such crazy transfer speeds.

So we've got the speeds, we just need to scale the whole thing up. Hopefully I'll see you on the other side of that 1-second GoT download in the not-so-distant future.

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