Your superfast fibre broadband now looks embarrassingly slow as new speed record is set

The team at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology looped the next-generation fibre-cable through coiled reams of fibre-optic that simulates a transmission distance of some 1,864 miles. No degradation in speed was reported at all.

For comparison, the length of the UK is 874 miles. So this next-generation cable could be used to connect a home in John o’ Groats to an exchange in Land’s End – and the resident could still expect to see 41,811,649Mbps speeds.

Just to put that speed into perspective. Under optimum lab conditions, downloading a 220 GB file – the size of the PlayStation 5 version of blockbuster hit Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, for example – would take 0.005552 seconds.

For now, Japan sees the technology being deployed for data transmission purposes, rather than downloading video games and streaming Netflix at home.