Would it be possible to send data at terabits per second through the home WiFi routers?

Well at present terabit speeds are available in fiber optic cables. But that is the total throughput of the cable. A fiber optic cable is made up of a number of "strands" that operate at much lower speeds.

In fact these strands are simply outputs of ethernet cards. So now if you look at max ethernet speeds you'll get something like 1gb/10gb/40 gb etc. So the speeds on the strands are limited by the processing capability of on board electronics.

If you go by wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_cable

"Modern fiber cables can contain up to a thousand fibers in a single cable, with potential bandwidth in the terabytes per second"

some rough math will tell you that each strand is doing a gigabit. Which is easy to achieve with common gigabit ethernet cards. A 1000 of them for a cable in the example given above.

Now coming back to the topic. Terabit data through home wifi routers. It's certainly possible. The bottleneck is not physical medium. Wifi transmission lines are also doing gigabit speeds over the air today. But we'll need lots of transmitters to achieve the same capacity. Just like fiber optic cables.

Considering the limitations of size and power this is difficult to do in a home wifi router with the current technology. But things are changing very rapidly. I'm hopeful that photonics will take off one day and expand the processing capacity of onboard devices by removing the data transfer bandwidth limitations. If that happens terabit transmissions may be possible on small devices.

An interesting article on petabit speed achieved over fiber.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/2

3/ntt_petabit_fibre/

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