14 Tbps over a Single Optical Fiber: Successful Demonstration of World's Largest Capacity

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news06e/0609/060929a.html

Here we go! As we enter the HD Movie scene, where the average movie easily becomes larger than 20GB, there might be incentives for the consumer to look for crazy transmission rates. Luckily, it looks like optical fiber networks will be replacing dial-up, cable, and dsl in the near future... That is if we can upgrade all the current network infrastructures, which is very expensive. The never-ending drive for more information and faster symmetrical speeds will benefit businesses the most. As newer network technologies come out, the choice of network options to choose from increases and the price for these options should be competitively priced.

I can imagine the Library of Congress taking advantage of optical fiber networks at these data transmission rates when it comes to uploading their books into an online digital format. I can imagine intelligence agencies using such networks to transmission encrypted data to their recipients. I see a lot of potential uses for such networks. I believe optical fiber networks are being used now as we speak! I believe Qwest is one company who offer optical fiber netowkrs with rated speeds of 20-40 Gbps.