Here you go, Internet speed freaks: Japanese researchers have set a new world download speed record of 402 Tbps (terabits per second), breaking last year's record of 321 Tbps.

This is effectively 402,000,000 Mbps (megabits per second), which makes the 950 Mbps (thanks Sonic) I am getting from my ISP at home look like a rounding error. It's so fast that I can download the entire 18+ GB "Elden Ring" and by extension the entire Steam library in less time than it takes to read this sentence. [The researchers used widely available fiber optic cables to achieve this new record. [According to a press release

, the research was conducted by an international team led by researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology's (NICT) Photonic Network Laboratory in Tokyo. [This included "combining six different doped fiber amplifiers with lumped and distributed Raman amplifiers to cover the entire low-loss transmission bandwidth of silica fiber," and a record-breaking bandwidth of 37.6 THz (terahertz) across 50 km of fiber-optic cable was achieved.

We don't know what half of these words mean, but we doubt we'll see anything close to these speeds in the near future at home; it would be great to download a big game like "Baldur's Gate 3" or "Call of Duty" in under a second, but PCGamer points out that even the best gaming PCs simply don't have the hardware to handle that much data that fast. Even if you could somehow cram all that data into the Ethernet port of a PC, there is no drive on earth that could write data at that speed.

Rather, the point here is that researchers have developed a new transmission system that can push data through fiber-optic cables faster than ever before. While all of this is experimental at this point, the findings from this research could play an important role in taking Internet speeds to the next level.