Answer: easy, if you’re a brilliant scientist and have access to the kind of technology available to the folks at Bell Labs. They’ve broken the optical data transmission record, crossing the 100 petabit per second.kilometer barrier. More precisely, they’ve transfered 15.5 terabits of data per second over the distance of 7,000 kilometers.

To do this, the researchers from the Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France have used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100 gigabits of data per second. Multiply the number of lasers with the transmission rate, and you get a crazy number of 15.5 terabits per second, over the distance of 7000 kilometers. Multiply those two numbers, and you get over 100 petabits per second.kilometers (a standard measure for high speed optical transmission).

To make all these silly numbers more understandable, I’ve applied a little math to it. The iTunes Store holds some 10 million songs. The average size of a song on iTunes is roughly 5 megabytes. So, the entire iTunes catalogue is about 50 million megabytes, or 47.6 terabytes heavy.

via http://mashable.com/2009/09/30/copy-entire-itunes/

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