A new world record for Internet download speed has been set in Japan by sending 402 terabits per second through standard optical fiber.

An international research team, led by the Photonic Network Laboratory of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), managed to achieve this feat on commercially available optical fiber. They used advanced technology to cover all available transmission bands in the fiber, employing several amplification technologies and special gain equalizers to access new wavelength bands and aggregate an optical transmission bandwidth of 37.6 THz.

The team presented their findings at the 47th International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications at the San Diego Convention Center in California, USA.

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To give you an idea how fast 402 Tbps, or 402,000,000 Megabits per second, is: a high-profile AAA game the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 can be downloaded in less than a tenth of a second. It’s as fast as the blink of the eye.

Practically, though, no home computer can get a broadband connection at such an astonishing speed; motherboards today commonly feature on-board 1GbE ethernet connectivity that allows speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps only. No modern routers and modems can accommodate the record speed either.

Before this, the last world record was set in 2023 at 321 Tbps. The NICT research team has managed to break it with a speed that’s 25 percent faster and with 35 percent more bandwidth in less than a year.

NICT has more details about this achievement on its official website here.

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