In new research, scientists have blown the roof off conventional telecommunications with a chip that can send nearly twice the amount of traffic as the entire internet in a single second—setting the speed record for data transmission. The researchers say that just one light source and one optical chip can work together to produce a “frequency comb” capable of eye-watering data transmission speeds. How can the same tiny collection of raw materials, namely silicon—what we already have in our home computers and infrastructure—produce such higher speeds?

The new chip was made by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and Japan’s Fujikura Ltd. company. Their paper appears in Nature Photonics.

“We experimentally demonstrate transmission of 1.84 Pbit s–1over a 37-core, 7.9-km-long fibre using 223 wavelength channels derived from a single microcomb ring resonator producing a stabilized dark-pulse Kerr frequency comb,” the authors write.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. The headline-grabbing statistic here, though, is the speed: 1.84 petabits, or, as New Atlas explains, “almost twice the global internet traffic per second.” One- to 10-gigabit home internet connections are the cutting edge in consumer tech for now, and one petabit is a million gigabits. The paper’s authors say fiber optics— glass-based cabling that carries the largest bandwidths of internet traffic—is key to global communication leading into the future, but our current technology will eventually hit its limit.

Remember the earliest telecommunications, like Morse code delivered over telegraph lines? Everything that has followed has the same basic foundational mechanic: on and off, 0 and 1, space and not-space. The “optic” part of fiber optic is that it’s the carrier for extremely rapid flashes of light. And a frequency comb, one of the most advanced ways to send the tiniest and most predictable flashes of light, is a natural best in class.

What’s a frequency comb? The U.S. government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explained as part of a recent study of its own that appears in the journal Nature: “[A] frequency comb is a type of laser whose light consists of many well-defined frequencies that can be measured accurately. Looking at the laser’s spectrum on a display, each frequency would stand out like one tooth of a comb, giving the technology its name.”

Frequency combs are commonly used to measure time and distance with precision, and applications range from atomic clocks to telescopes.