We Can Shuttle Mind-Boggling Gobs of Data Worldwide in an Instant—But We Want More

The speed of communication was once constrained by geography and how fast a human, horse, bird, train, or ship could traverse it. Then a new technology took over. It started in 1844 with a terse message transmitted over telegraph wire. Now each day, billions of messages, articles, photographs, and videos criss-cross the globe in fractions of a second—carried on light beams.

We rarely consider the near-miracle this implies. How exactly does a message go from New York to Tokyo? What invisible paths does it follow? And how does it share the line with all the other messages sent at the same time?

Alongside computing, another high-tech revolution was running in parallel. This was the quest to transform information to light, light to information—and to transmit enormous flows of data around the globe in the blink of an eye. Although it doesn't extend all the way to most homes (yet), fiber optic cable forms the backbone of the Internet. And for good reason.

“In 1977, the first optical fiber communications systems carried 45 million bits per second—at that time an astronomical amount of information. And it turned out that that wasn’t enough,” explains Bell Labs’ Andy Chraplyvy in a recent video. “Now, a single fiber can carry up to 10 [trillion bits] of information per second. And yet we’ve gotten to the point where that’s not going to be enough.”

What is 10 trillion bits in everyday terms? First, divide by eight to get 1.25 trillion bytes (terabytes). This is equivalent to a few hundred movies, a few hundred thousand images—or Ray Kurzweil’s estimate of the memory capacity of the human brain. That's a lot of data for a single fiber as thin as a human hair.

And still, Chraplyvy is right. It’s not going to be enough.