- Japanese scientists achieved new record speed using standard fibre optic cabling
- Speed means huge games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 could be downloaded in less than one tenth of a second
- But no chance such speeds will be available to domestic users any time soon
Internet connections speeds are always increasing – ask your parents about how slow 56kbps was – but a team of Japanese engineers has just broken the world record speed by 25%.
Peak rate
The team from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology managed to reach a peak rate of 402 terrabytes per second in a test.
What’s more is the team achieved this speed by using commercially available optical fibres. But what they did do was use as many transmission bands as possible, as well as state-of-the-art amplifiers and gain equalisers, which meant they reached a total signal bandwidth of 37.6THz – more than 100,000 times more WiFi 7 can use.
The speed was enough to be able to download huge 150GB games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2 in less than a tenth of a second – less time than it takes to blink your eye.
Not for home use
But don’t get too excited about the prospect of being able to download your favorite games this quickly on your home PC or console. The equipment used by the NICT team is too costly for home users, plus there are various bottlenecks found in even the most advanced gaming PCs, as well as the limits imposed by the speed of the RAM or SSD, which means it will be impossible to do.
But the research – and record – is valuable as higher speeds will be demanded as the amount of data being demanded by the web continues to grow quickly.
