Technology Improved hardware can send ten times as much data through existing fibre-optic cables, potentially providing a way to massively upgrade the internet's infrastructure without the cost and inconvenience of laying any new cables Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email Team member Ronit Sohanpal works on the high-speed data transmission set up UCL A new speed record has been set for data transmission through an existing, commercially installed fibre-optic cable, with 450 terabits per second – or 450,000,000,000,000 bits per second – being beamed through a pair of cables underneath London’s busy streets. Polina Bayvel at University College London and her colleagues achieved the record using existing fibre-optic cables running from their laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data centre in Canary Wharf, then back again. That rate of data transmission would be enough for around 50 million movies to be streamed simultaneously.…