A team of engineers in Japan has managed to reach record internet speeds of over 402 Terabits per second (Tbps), a data transmission rate so fast you could download massive game files like Baldur’s Gate 3 in milliseconds. Aussies around the country are currently looking at their speed tests in comparison and crying.
As per a report by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (via Fudzilla), the engineering team was able to reach internet speeds of more than 402 Tbps using standard fibre optic cables, beating the previous data rate record of 321 Tbps set last October. Just to put that into perspective, that’s about 50 Terabytes per second, which means literally any video game available (even the ones with gargantuan file sizes) could be downloaded in milliseconds.
The most impressive part is that the NICT team didn’t have to Macgyver anything particularly out of the ordinary to get these internet speeds. They used 50km of commercially available optical fibres, gain equalisers, and signal amplifiers for the record-breaking test. The total signal bandwidth reached was 37.6 THz, according to the report – over 100,000 times the bandwidth WiFi 7 can utilise.
For comparison, the most popular internet speed in Australia is 50 Mbps with some households on 100Mbps. 3 million lucky households are able to access gigabit internet – that’s 1000Mbps. That means the speeds seen in the NICT test are so beyond multiples of our fastest on home soil that I daren’t even try to write it. Just know it’s a lot.
If this new record has you dreaming of downloading new games faster than you can blink, unfortunately, we likely won’t be seeing internet speeds like this readily available any time soon, if ever. The cost alone of trying to reach speeds of 402Tbps would be so prohibitively expensive for ISPs, let alone customers paying their bills, and that’s not even considering the hardware limitations of modern PCs.
If you, and any ISP, was willing to pony up the money to try to reach a data transfer rate even close, your motherboard would present another obstacle, given most modern motherboards offer support for 1-2.5 Gbps, and at best 10GBps. Your SSD and RAM would likely also create another bottleneck if somehow the price and your motherboard didn’t already stop you in your tracks.
While we can’t download games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Baldur’s Gate 3, or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in a millisecond just yet, the NICT’s speed record does prove promising for future technology upgrades that could see us—yes, even Australia—bumped up to slightly faster speeds—probably just nowhere near the Terabits per second ballpark.
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