How fast an internet connection do you really want? Well, that probably varies – based on your needs, not to mention your budget for the monthly payment – but odds are you might regard 402Tbps as overkill. Yes, we didn’t mistype that – 402Tbps, as in Terabytes – and as you might guess, that staggering speed is a new world record for the fastest-ever performance achieved via a standard (commercially available) fiber optic cable. The 402Tbps speed was hit by a team from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), as Fudzilla reports. It was realized using a 50km length of fiber and a whole bunch of clever trickery including six signal amplifiers to pep things up (quite considerably). The NICT explains: “Novel optical gain equalizers also allowed access to new wavelength bands that are not yet utilized in deployed systems.” 402Tbps works out at downloading just over 50TB every second, no less, and easily […]