Sorry, 2024's record-breaking 402,000,000 Mbps internet connection isn't available at your house yet
Earlier this year researchers at Japan's National Institutde of Information and Communications Technology (NIICT) hit a record-breaking speed for internet over a standard fibre optic cable: 402 Tbps. With a T. That's 402,000,000 Mbps, to put it in the speed measurement you're probably more familiar with.
No, I'm not going to try and put it in terms of the 56K connection you were using in 1999. That's too many phone lines, okay? I'm too busy bugging my ISP and asking when I'm going to be able to upgrade from this absolutely trash 1,000 Mbps they're selling me now. I mean, if those nerds can hit 402 Tbps why can't I have it?
For a lot of reasons, apparently, but not the ones you might expect. Though it was a lab-style test, the record was set using 50 kilometers (approximately 31 miles) of normal, commercial fibre optic cable. Unfortunately it also required about as many light transmission bands as fibre optic has physically available, plus absolutely cutting-edge amplifiers and gain equalizers. That let them beat the previous speed record by about 25%.
Either way, as PC Gamer writer and killjoy Nic Evanson pointed out at the time, even though that would theoretically let me download Baldur's Gate 3 in less than four milliseconds, give or take a millisecond, my computer wouldn't be able to do jack all with it because every other part of a modern computer is rated for way, way, way slower data transfer speeds than that.
"There are multiple bottlenecks inside even the very best gaming PCs, starting with the Ethernet port," noted Nic, "You might be fortunate to have a motherboard equipped with one that's rated at 10GbE or 10 Gbps, but that's slower than NICT's achievement by a factor of around 400,000."
Still, here's hoping that in the gigafuture our Turbobroadband Direct-to-Satellite wires can get that sweet 402 Tbps speed on tap. ISPs, get on it.