Readers of a certain age may well remember when having a 56 kbps internet connection was considered fast. Then DSL came along and dial-up looked like a comatose snail in comparison. A team of engineers, though, have achieved a data transmission rate of 402 Tbps using standard fibre optic cables, so fast that you could download Baldur's Gate 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the entire Fallout 4 collection all in less than a tenth of a second.
The team in question is Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (via Fudzilla) and it didn't use any weird tech or microscopic distances in a lab—50 km of commercially available optical fibres and signal amplifiers were employed in the test. At an estimated peak rate of 402 Tbps or 50.25 TB/s, it's approximately 25% higher than the previous record, set last October.
