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If you think your internet speed is fast, it pales in comparison to what has been achieved by a research team in Japan. Hailing from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, this team just used standard fiber optic cables to produce a speed so astounding that it genuinely seems unbelievable.
Even if you had the best gaming router, there is no way to make commercial use of the 402 million Mbps, or 402Tbps, achieved by these engineers. We’ve come a long way since the days of dial-up, but we’re not quite ready for what this team has accomplished.
While the speed itself is impressive, what’s more notable is the fact this was achieved using 50km of standard fiber optical cables, combined with six signal amplifiers. The final result exceeded that of the best previous attempt from October 2023 by over 25%, while the bandwidth increased by 35%.
What’s more, this feat was accomplished using existing technology used by internet service providers. Naturally, such speeds are a very long way from breaking into the home market, but it’s worth remembering how good things could be the next time your provider drops the ball with coverage in the middle of a Counter-Strike 2 match.
If you’re wondering why these speeds would be useless even in the modern home, it’s simply because the standards aren’t there to cope with it yet. Even the fastest wired network connections on standard PCs and home routers only run at 10Gbps or 2.5Gbps, and most of them still only have Gigabit Ethernet connections.
Meanwhile, the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs, such as the Crucial T705, peak at speeds of 14.5GB/s (116Gbps), and even a 16x PCIe 5.0 graphics interface tops out at 63GB/s (504Gbps). Even if you had the best gaming PC hardware available, it couldn’t even make use of 1Tbps of Internet bandwidth, let alone 402Tbps.
It’s fun to imagine how quickly games would download with such speeds if possible though, and with a 402Tbps connection, which further translates to around 50.25TB/s, you could download a copy of Mortal Kombat 1 (135GB) in a split second.
Just imagine, you could probably download your entire Steam Pile of Shame in a few seconds, depending on how many games you still have yet to play.
