When I was a kid, I went to a science camp, and one of the instructors showed us a few inches of fiber optic cable. I remember thinking it was so neat that you could light it up at one end, and no matter how you twisted the cable, you could see the light come out on the other end. At the time, I thought how useful it might be to send Morse code through it—I was very young. Things have changed a bit since then. Today, UK Aston University researchers sent data at a 301 terabits per second (Tbps) clip over existing fiber networks.
How fast is that? It’s about 1.2 million times faster than the US’ medium fixed broadband speed of 242.48 megabits per second (Mbps). Or, it’s fast enough to deliver 1,800 4K movies to your home in a second. And I thought my recent home internet fiber upgrade to 2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) was impressive!Of course, no one will get 301 Tbps speeds in their home office. In the real world, I know a handful of people with 10 Gbps connections to their houses and many data centers with 40 Gbps local area networks.
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