This article reports that trials by BT and Alcatel-Lucent have achieved broadband speeds of 1.4 terabits per second between London and Ipswich (over a 410km link – though Ipswich is only about 80 miles from London).
That would be equivalent to being able to transfer about 44 HD movies in one second!
It isn’t going to be available any time soon, but it does open the way for the future. Mind you, you have to read some of the comments on that BBC story. I love this one:
Kieran
9 Hours ago
10mb is adequate for anyone. 30mb is nice to have. Why does anyone need more?
Let’s get everyone on at least 10mb (I’ve had it for years and it’s a must-have these days), and providing better upload speeds, before we start messing around with anything faster. Even the 100mb fibre rollout is pointless IMO; how it will provide any economic benefits is beyond me.
I wonder if Kieran goes around smashing weaving machines in his spare time? And then this one:
Richard
9 Hours ago
For ordinary home broadband users it’s pretty meaningless. It’s not as if anyone needs to download “44 HD films in a second” . Is anyone’s life so busy that they can’t spare a half hour or so, to download what they need?
Those are “editor’s picks”, too! And some clown actually wrote this – on an online comments system, remember:
I have never used the internet and I never will.
Ah well. I’ll just stick with my good old Virgin Media connection, which was automatically upgraded this week, and let the Luddites and senile Daily Mail readers carry on. Here’s my current speed:
I can download a 1gb file in less than a minute, so I’m not complaining (that would be less than 5 minutes for a whole film). And I get the same result (apart from the ping) if I run the test on a Frankfurt server.