Universities Set High-Speed Internet Record

At 186 Gbps, you could download The Beatles' entire discography in a tenth of a second.

Researchers at Cal Tech and the University of Victoria have set a new record for how fast one computer can transfer data to another computer at an astounding 186 gigabits, or 23.25 gigabytes, per second. That rate was upheld for 11 hours as files were transferred between UVic and servers at a conference in Seattle over a commercially-available optical network. For reference, Canadians are lucky to get any download speeds higher than a megabit per second (which is a fraction of what users in South Korea and Japan get, but that's a different story). Explaining it in much better detail than we ever could is this handy video produced by the teams: