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Broadband in UK hits speeds of 1.4Tbps

Superfast broadband seems as slow as a snail crawling through treacle compared to the internet speeds researchers have just achieved. 

Engineers from BT and Alcatel Lucent have managed to successfully test a 1.4Tbps connection between Ipswich and London. The connection is so fast, it could download 44 uncompressed high definition movies in just a second.

The test equipment wasn’t from the future but real life hardware used elsewhere by telecoms companies. The test was conducted over a 250 mile distance between BT’s Adastral Park research campus just outside Ipswich and the BT Tower in the middle of London.

While consumers may not get these speeds just yet, it does show what can be achieved with the telco’s existing fibre network. It also means that in the future ISPs could offer much higher speeds than present without having to invest in completely new equipment or network upgrades.

“This could allow BT to more easily scale its core network capacity to meet consumer and business demands for more bandwidth-hungry services such as streaming video, whilst more efficiently using its existing core fibre infrastructure,” said Alcatel Lucent in a statement.

The two firms achieved the speeds by using a technology called Flexgrid. This shortens the gaps between transmission channels and allows an increase in density of traffic by around 43 per cent. The trial was conducted through the overlaying of an “Alien Super Channel” comprised of seven 200 Gigabits per second (Gbps) channels bundled together to provide a combined capacity of 1.4Tbps.

The increase in data transmission rates will be good news for video on-demand subscribers as this makes it more possible to transmit 4K transmissions through internet infrastructure.

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