Earlier this year, researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NIICT) achieved record Internet speeds over standard fiber optic cable: 402 Tbps. In the case of T. That’s 402,000,000 Mbps if we factor it into the speed measurement you’re probably more familiar with.
No, I won’t try to equate this with the 56K connection you used in 1999. That’s too many phone lines, okay? I’m too busy bugging my ISP and asking when I’ll be able to upgrade from this absolutely crappy 1000Mbps they’re selling me now. I mean, if these nerds can get 402 Tbps, why can’t I have it?
Apparently for many reasons, but not the ones you might expect. Although this was a laboratory test, the record was set using 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of normal, commercial fiber-optic cable. Unfortunately, it also required as many lithe transmission bands as physically available optical fiber, as well as absolutely state-of-the-art amplifiers and gain equalizers. Thanks to this, they beat the previous speed record by about 25%.
Either way, as PC Gamer writer and PC gaming enthusiast Nic Evanson pointed out at the time, even though it would theoretically allow me to download Baldur’s Gate 3 in less than four milliseconds, to the nearest millisecond, my computer wouldn’t be able to jack and that’s all because every other part of a state-of-the-art computer has much, much slower data transfer rates.
“Even the best gaming PCs have a lot of bottlenecks, starting with the Ethernet port,” Nic noted. “You might be lucky to have a motherboard with a 10GbE or 10Gbps card, but that’s slower than the NICT achievement of a factor of around 400,000.”
Nevertheless, we hope that in the gigafuture our Turbobroadband Direct-to-Satellite cables will be able to achieve this speed of 402 Tbps. ISPs, get on with it.
