A team of researchers led by the (take a deep breath) Photonic Network Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Japan has announced a successful test of the world's first successful petabit-class internet transmission over 1,000 km. That's a lot of words which essentially mean—new mega-fast internet connection tested over long distance and worked. Oh, and you can plumb me in right now, if you like.
Actually, the idea of running one over an existing network isn't quite as far-fetched as you might think (via Cnet). The incredibly fast speeds (equating to 1,020,000,000 Mbps, 3.5 million times faster than your average US broadband connection) were achieved with a new design of fibre-optic cable with 19 cores, which ends up being the same thickness as regular fibre-optic cables currently in use.
