Readers of a certain age may remember when a 56 kbps Internet connection was considered fast. Then came DSL, and dial-up seemed like a comatose snail by comparison. However, a team of engineers has achieved a data transfer rate of 402 Tbps using standard fiber optic cables, so fast that you could download Baldur’s Gate 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the entire Fallout 4 collection in less than a tenth of a second.

The team in question is Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (via Fudzilla), and they didn’t use any weird engineering or microscopic distances in the lab – the test used 50km of off-the-shelf fiber optics and signal amplifiers. With an estimated peak rate of 402 Tbps, or 50.25 TB/s, it’s about 25% higher than the previous record set last October.

Fiber optics are used as the backbone of the internet around the world and work by sending digital information via modulated infrared, light and ultraviolet signals. NICT deployed as many transmission bands as possible and used state-of-the-art amplifiers and gain equalizers to achieve a total signal bandwidth of 37.6 THz. That’s over 100,000 times more bandwidth than WiFi 7, for example, can use.

Of course, no one will get a 400 Tbit/s broadband connection for their home in the near future. The cost of the current configuration is far too high for ordinary users, but the development will certainly be of interest to the entire industry, since the amount of data that needs to be accessed via the Internet is gigantic.

But let’s assume you could have such a home broadband package. Could you really download multiple 150GB games in under a second? Unfortunately not, as even the best gaming PCs have several bottlenecks, starting with the Ethernet port.

You may be lucky enough to have a motherboard equipped with a 10GbE or 10 Gbit/s chip, but that is about 400,000 times slower than NICT performance.

Even if you find a way to get around this problem (and the PCH bus bottleneck), you’ll be limited by the speed of either your gaming PC’s RAM or SSD. These simply can’t write data fast enough to keep up. A top-end rig will easily cope with a good 1Gbps fiber connection at home, but it won’t stand a chance against 412,000Gbps!

At least not yet. A gaming PC from the 56k dial-up era would be a huge bottleneck on a modern DSL connection, so you never know – in a few decades we might all be complaining about how slow our 400Tbps ultra-broadband is. However, games will probably be much larger than 150GB by that time.

It’s funny how sometimes advances in PC technology never feel like advances.