Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have broken the world record for Internet speed. They succeeded in transmitting data at an astounding 319 terabits per second.

If you already think your Internet connection is slow, this news won't make you feel any better. On the contrary, it may make you resent your provider (perhaps) even more than you already do.

For reference, the previous record was 178 terabits per second. This is still an unbelievably fast data transfer rate, but the new record is nearly twice as fast. To make the new record even more impressive, the researchers were also able to maintain a speed of 319 terabits over a distance of 3,001 km, or nearly 1,865 miles.

And you thought it was exciting to be able to have gigabit Internet at home.

Of course, such speeds won't be available at home anytime soon. The researchers had to rely on four-core fiber optic cables using "552 PDM-16QAM, wavelength division multiplexing channels." Engineers also utilized "erbium and thulium doped fiber amplifiers and distributed Raman amplification."

The significant increase in speed itself was also thanks to the engineers' first combined use of S-, C-, and L-band transmission. Normally, only the C and L bands are used for this type of long-distance transmission, but there were clear advantages to adding the S band to the mix.

However, I am not a network engineer, so I have little understanding of the technical details. However, I fully understand that this type of work is seldom easy, and the engineers are definitely to be commended for their accomplishments.

Of course, there is more work to be done. The team believes there is more speed available and states that there are more ways to increase transmission capacity. Besides, work will be done to "extend the range to transoceanic distances."

One can only hope that the advances discovered by this research will be available to us all with our home broadband connections, and soon. However, that may be asking a bit much, given how slow the spread of normal fiber-optic transmission speeds is in some places and indeed in some countries.