How fast do you really want your internet connection? Well, that probably varies – depending on your needs, not to mention your budget for the monthly payment – but chances are you’ll consider 402 Tbps to be overkill.
Yes, we didn’t mistype it: 402 Tbps, which stands for Terabytes. And as you might have guessed, that blazing speed is a new world record for the fastest performance ever achieved over a standard (commercially available) fiber optic cable.
The speed of 402 Tbps was achieved by a team from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Fudzilla reports. It was achieved using a 50km long fibre optic cable and a whole lot of clever tricks, including six signal boosters to give things a boost (quite a lot).
The NICT explains: “New optical gain equalizers also provide access to new wavelength bands not yet used in deployed systems.”
402 Tbps equates to a download speed of a whopping 50 TB per second, which exceeds the previous high speed by about 25%.
The NICT further notes: “These results demonstrate the potential of ultra-wideband transmission enabled by a novel amplifier and broadband spectrum shaping technology to increase the information transfer capacity of new and deployed optical fibers.”
Analysis: Downloads at a glance
Of course, such technology is still a million miles away from being implemented at a consumer level. What this does show, however, is how quickly technology is advancing in yet another area, and that we may well end up with ridiculously fast downloads along these lines, which top our rankings for the best broadband lines.
This kind of performance would allow you to, for example, download an entire 4K movie in under a millisecond (or maybe a bit more, if it’s a particularly long film). Or you could tackle massive game installs like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield in around 3ms.
Snappy isn’t everything, and we’ve certainly come a long way since the days of Quake and online play via a 56K dial-up modem (when we envied those lucky enough to be able to afford 64K ISDN and its relatively superior stability, in terms of packet loss).
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