TERABIT BROADBAND
A new fibre-optic breakthrough promises to unleash broadband up to 4.5 million times faster than what you might have at home
WORDS JACK PARSONS
DID YOU KNOW?
Every person on Earth generates 1.7 megabytes of data – enough to fill an 850-page book – every second
The internet is inundated. There are now 5.35 billion people online – that’s 66 per cent of the world’s population. On average, they spend seven hours a day surfing the web. And 80 per cent of what they do is watch video – whether that’s video calling for work or watching Netflix shows. Both eat up a lot of bandwidth, which is what we call the maximum rate at which data can be transferred. This is measured in bits per second.
It’s not just people who are putting the internet under strain. There are more than 15 billion gadgets connected too. Almost twothirds of these are personal devices like phones and tablets, which get more powerful with each upgrade. But there are also hundreds of millions more ‘smart sensors’ that connect to the internet all on their own. They monitor everything from the weather to factory machinery. Each one might only send a tiny bit of data, but they’re constantly working, and there are so many of them that it all adds up.
It’s easy to think we live in a limitless wireless world. But 5G phone masts are only the tip of the internet iceberg. Around 95 per cent of the world’s web traffic is actually carried by fibre-optic cables – most of them hidden underwater. Currently, there are 378 of these telecommunication tentacles crisscrossing the seafloor. With a combined length of around 74,564 miles, they connect every continent except Antarctica.