Researchers show what is possible with fiber optic cables. They achieve internet speeds that make even SSDs look downright ancient.
How fast is the connection? Responsible for the new world record are scientists from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) from Japan. According to their press release, they achieved 402 terabits per second.
Is there a tariff that brings this to the home? No, the mentioned internet speed was achieved using commercially available fiber optic cables, which could also be lying underground in front of your house, but it is nevertheless a special case that currently serves purely for technical advancement.
Even China is left behind here, but they also celebrated a seemingly respectable success with internet for the general population.
Terabit, what exactly is that? Terabit is basically the big brother of the megabit, which you know from advertisements for internet connections. 1 terabit corresponds to 1,000,000 megabits. The fastest that Telekom, as the market leader, currently offers in the area is 1,000 megabits per second.
However, this unit should not be confused with our familiar measurement for storage space, gigabytes. 1000 megabits correspond to 0.125 GB gigabytes. With a top connection in Germany, you would need about eight seconds at best to download one gigabyte.
When the SSD becomes a bottleneck
How was the speed achieved? The distance bridged in the test of fiber optic cables is 50 kilometers. The technical details in this case are truly for experts, so here greatly simplified:
- According to NICT, all transmission bands (OESCLU) of the low-loss region of standard fibers were used for the first time worldwide.
- Amplification technologies stabilized the signal, allowing for a bandwidth of 37.6 THz. That is more than 100,000 times that of the new WiFi 7 standard with a maximum of 320 MHz.
Baldur’s Gate 3 in a few milliseconds, how is that claim made? As of mid-July 2024, an installation of Larian’s mega role-playing game is around 150 gigabytes large. Let’s assume nothing is packed during the download with the 402 terabit line and we are downloading the game loose, then the following applies:
- Converted via Online-Rechner.net: 402 terabits per second in gigabytes: 50,250
- 150 gigabytes divided by 50,250 gigabytes per second = Approximately 3 milliseconds
And how large is the new CoD supposed to be? According to the most recent information from the publisher Activision on X, the new CoD will likely be around 300 gigabytes at most. However, even that would be a drop in the bucket for this thick internet connection.
But there must be a catch, right? Yes, that is of course very naive. Because even if the data could fit through the line, your computer—no matter how modern—would virtually choke on the data mess. Even the fastest SSD, connected via PCIe 5.0, barely reaches 12,000 megabytes per second when writing.
A completely different race was once started by a YouTuber with millions of subscribers—and the race against time is still ongoing. He programmed a certain kind of code to start an experiment on and with YouTube. The article about what the goal behind it is and why he firmly believes it will fail can be found here with us on MeinMMO.
