Just when I was feeling smug for being able to express rage at Brandon and Lori on Storage Hunters while also eating microwaved burgers without making a mess, scientists have to trample on my personal achievements. BT and Alcatel-Lucent have revealed that tests of a new method for transferring electronic data in the UK recently reached an amazing 1.4 terabits per second. Great news for those of us who still watch fights through an internet stream.
It will likely be a few years before you or I can benefit from internet speeds that can deliver 44 HD movies a second but being able to achieve these speeds on existing fiber lines is a massive step forward, especially considering we all but live on the internet now. Moves to cloud computing, Netflix and streaming services as well as online gaming have seen to that.
Researchers at BT and Alcatel-Lucent managed this by heavily prioritizing traffic and giving the heavy duty stuff more room. Essentially, it’s similar to narrowing lanes on a road so that more vehicles can move at the same time. It sounds like multiple road traffic accidents waiting to happen but luckily this data transfer is much smarter than the average driver and is 100% less likely to drive under the influence. [Source]
