Here’s something to chew over as you watch your Torrent download bar fill in one slim sliver at a time — researchers at Caltech and the University of Victoria have just set a new Internet speed record. Just how fast are we talking? How about 186 Gigabits per second (divide that by 8 to get the number of Gigabytes per second).
To put that in perspective, the average American has access to Internet speeds of approximately 5 Megabits per second, so yeah, these guys were surfing around 37-thousand times faster than you can on your computer. You could fill up a standard 250 GB hard drive in a little over 10-seconds at that speed.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this record is that it was achieved entirely with commercially available components. In other words, this kind of speed could be at our fingertips sooner than you might think. Let’s not forget — 15-years ago it took longer to load a 100-pixel wide animated gif than it takes to download a high-def TV show today. Entertainment industry, enjoy these last few years before people are able to download every movie ever made in an afternoon.
via Geekosystem