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The achievement was made by researchers at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the Washington State Convention Centre in Seattle, who transfered data back and forth over a 131 mile distance at speeds of 186Gb/s, significantly faster than the previous 2009 record of 119Gb/s.

 

Transfers were also sent from Seattle to other US locations and even Brazil and South Korea, showing that vast distances are not an issue with this latest discovery.

 

 

The technology used included highly tuned servers running over a 100Gb/s circuit set up by Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE). The California Institue of Technology, University of Michigan, Florida Internatonal University, and the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) also participated.

 

The breakthrough will affect scientific research, big businesses and consumer life, as the technology could be used by the Large Hadron Collider for physics developments, by companies like Google and Amazon that depend on high speed transfers, and by broadband customers who are still struggling with paltry speeds in the low Megabits.

 

To put the speeds into perspective, the highest speed available in the UK is 1.5Gb/s, and that is only a limited trial by Virgin Media in East London. Some people are lucky to get 1.5Mb/s, with the average speed throughout the UK being just under 7Mb/s. Within a few years we could all be downloading files at speeds over 100Gb/s.

 

Source: BBC