Japan breaks internet speed record with 402 Tbps – so fast you could download Elden Ring in a millisecond
For all you internet speed freaks: Japanese researchers have officially set a new world record for download speeds at 402 Tbps (terabits per second), beating the record of 321 Tbps they set last year.
That’s effectively 402,000,000 Mbps (megabits per second), which makes the 950 Mbps I get at home from my own ISP (thanks, Sonic) look like a rounding error. It’s so fast that you could download all 18+ GB of Elden Ring – and heck, your entire Steam library for good measure – in less time than it took to read this sentence.
This is a big deal because it gives us a glimpse into the speeds possible with our current technology, as the researchers used widely available fiber optic cables to achieve this new record.
They also developed new technologies for this purpose, including “the world’s first O- to U-band transmission system that enables DWDM transmission in a commercially available standard fiber optic cable and is achieved with a specially developed amplifier technology,” according to a press release.
The work was carried out by an international team led by researchers from the Photonic Network Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Tokyo, Japan.
Together they worked on ways to better amplify data signals to fully exploit the transmission capabilities of fiber optic cables. This included “combining six variants of doped fiber amplifiers with concentrated and distributed Raman amplification to cover all low-loss transmission bands of quartz fibers” to achieve a record-breaking bandwidth of 37.6 THz (terahertz) over 50 km of fiber optic cable.
I can’t tell you what half of those words mean, but I can tell you that you won’t be experiencing speeds anywhere near that fast at home any time soon. As wonderful as it would be to download big games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Call of Duty in under a second, PCGamer points out that even the best gaming PCs simply don’t have the hardware to process that much data that quickly. Even if you could somehow cram all that data through your PC’s Ethernet port, there’s no drive in the world that could write it that fast.
No, what matters here is that researchers have developed a new transmission system that can move data through fiber optic cables faster than ever before. Although it’s still an experiment at this point, the findings from this research could play a key role in taking internet speeds to the next level.
