Dayou Qian of NEC managed a transmission rate of 101.7 terabits per second across 165 meters of fiber.
For a visual to ponder on that's equivalent to 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs or approximately three solid months of HD video. That's a bit for sure. Current speeds between Washington DC and NY is only a few terabits per second currently.
He did this by "squeezing" pulses of ligth from 370 lasers into the pulse received by the receiver. Each laser emitted it's own sliver of infrared that contained several phases, polarities, and amplitudes of light waves that was used to code the packets of information.
Jun Sakaguchi of Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo, has his own version with a 7 light guiding cores in one length of fiber and each core carried 5.6 Tbps for a total of 109 Tbps total transfer.
Both of these however are not especially practical currently with multi-core fibre being notoriously complicated to produce and amplifying the signals for long distance transmission for both. But data tranfer needs to ncrease witht he demand and this might be the answer, the first likely to adopt his technology would be the data servers in Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
