New internet speed record set at 186Gbps

Previous internet speed records have been broken by Caltech in the U.S. The new speed to beat is a mind boggling 186Gbps – that’s roughly 23 gigabytes per second. A 1TB drive would take a little more than 40 seconds to fill up. That kind of bandwidth isn’t meant for everyday use at home, but for universities. Caltech (California Institute of Technology) along with the University of Victoria, the University of Michigan, Florida University and CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) beat this record. The team had previously set a record at 119Gbps, back in 2009. This kind of bandwidth could be beneficial to CERN, which generates a ton of information and requires transferring that quickly to different locations around the world.

Faster than the speed of light?

The demonstration of 186Gbps speeds was recently done at the SuperComputing 2011 conference in Seattle. Similar data transfer tests were also carried out across continents. For example, data was transferred between the Caltech booth at the conference and centres in Brazil and Korea. CERN has generated roughly 100 petabytes of data and this is said to increase a 1,000 times in the future. This development and demonstration should only help demonstrate the capabilities and implement the technology for practical purposes.