Over the past decade, there has been a major push to deliver the internet to all corners of Costa Rica. This is happening all over the world too, as the internet becomes a more important presence in our lives. Now a team in Japan has pushed current cable technology to its limit, achieving the fastest registered internet speeds ever recorded at 402,000,000 megabits per second.
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Improving The Internet
While the new internet speed record is noteworthy, it’s more impressive that it was achieved using standard fiber-optic cables. Fiber-optic cables have been in use since the 1990s, supporting faster internet connections over time. With this latest experiment, a new upper limit has been set for fiber-optic technology.
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At the same time, the internet has consistently become a larger presence in most people’s lives. The biggest and best services have moved online, where reaching a wider audience is easier than ever before. This is best seen in industries like e-commerce or entertainment services like Gaming, where casino games get hosted over the internet. They rely on customers having an internet connection to access online roulette live streams and other business-related pages. As more businesses make the move online, the technology that supports the internet needs to improve so audiences can access them.
Improving the internet isn’t just a business concern. Governments, banks, and utilities also use the internet to deliver information and provide their services. The internet has also enriched and emboldened many countries, Costa Rica included, by broadcasting their natural beauty and cultural traditions across the web. As the world becomes more interconnected, a stronger internet will be required to transmit even more data across the planet. Fiber-optic cables are more than capable of delivering super-fast speeds, but more infrastructure is required to unlock their potential.
The New Internet Speed Record
On the 26th of June 2024, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) published an English press release about how they pushed fiber-optic technology to its limit, setting a new internet speed record. They achieved a data rate of 402,000,000 Mbps, or 402 terabytes every second, using commercially available optical fiber that anybody can get their hands on.
The experiment was held under exceptional circumstances, involving 50 kilometers of wire and a lot of amplification equipment. This enabled a 37.6 terahertz signal bandwidth that is more than 100,000 times more powerful than the best deployments of WiFi 7, the latest wireless standard. The result was a data transfer that was 25% faster than the previous record holder for optical fiber cables.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the internet is about to get a lot faster. The experiment was conducted at great cost, using bandwidth that service providers don’t have access to. Even if the infrastructure was in place to support a 400 Tbps data plan, our devices have multiple chokepoints that downgrade data transfer speeds. For example, ethernet cables, CPUs, and even motherboards are rated to facilitate a certain amount of data writing/transmission per second.
The NICT didn’t set out to make this new record, but instead explore how optical fiber can meet the growing data burden that comes with an increasingly digitized society. Despite being past deadlines, the paper detailing the NICT’s findings had been accepted and presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference 2024 back in March.
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While consumers won’t see terabytes-per-second internet connections anytime soon, the NICT is optimistic that “beyond 5G” services will spur an exponential increase in data transfer rates. As organizations like the NICT and its peers continue to experiment, this record will likely be surpassed in the future and prove that lightning-fast internet speeds are possible, just not viable with modern infrastructure.
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Carter Maddox
