A team of researchers have made a huge breakthrough in data transmission via fiber optics by using a single computer chip to transfer more than the current internet traffic.

Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues from Denmark, Sweden, and Japan used a photonic chip to transfer twice the existing internet traffic.

Traffic is approximately 230 million photo downloads per second or 1.84 petabits of data per second.

They used the chip to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels. Photonic chip is a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips.

The team split the stream into 37 sections for each fiber optic cable core. Then they split those sections into 223 data chunks in the electromagnetic spectrum and transmitted them all at once over 7.9 kilometers without interfering with each other.

“It’s an incredibly large amount of data that we’re sending through, essentially, less than a square millimeter [of cable]. It just goes to show that we can go so much further than we are today with internet connections,” says Jørgensen in New Scientist.

Jørgensen further thinks that they can improve on the current setup and create an even smaller on-chip design about the size of a matchbox. Rather than multiple lasers in parallel, they want to shrink the equipment down to the silicon level.

The work from the Copenhagen-based scientists shows that “a single optical frequency-comb source based on a silicon nitride ring resonator” can theoretically take the technology of Internet into the future.