German Researchers Set 40Gb Per Second WiFi Network Speed Record

At a time when some of us are finding our home Gigabit lines a bit constrictive comes some Germans from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to help make our setups feel even more inadequate. The folks there have created a Wi-Fi solution that uses "better hardware" along with a high radio frequency of 240GHz to produce a constant connection speed of 40Gbit/s (5GB/s) at a distance of about 0.6 miles (much further than the 20 or 30 feet inside of your house).

The ultra-high 240GHz frequency is required to push such heavy data, which at 40Gbit/s is about 293x faster than the theoretical maximum of 802.11n (140Mbit/s), and 47x faster than the current top-end 802.11ac (866Mbit/s). Oh - and it's also 6x faster than the future 802.11ad wireless standard (7Gbit/s). 

With a typing speed of 60 words-per-minute, ~2.5 Netflix-quality movies could be transferred over this connection in the time it took you to write a single word. You'd be able to download the beefy 30GB Max Payne 3 in a mere six seconds. If hard drives offered limitless performance, you'd be able to completely fill a 4TB drive in 13 minutes.

It's worth noting that even if we had access to a connection like this, our storage devices wouldn't be able to keep up. You'd theoretically need at least 10 top-quality SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration to make it happen. That seems a bit harsh on the pocketbook.

What this technology could deliver in the future is the ability to offer a high-speed connection to those in rural areas, where wired connections are just too expensive to deploy - especially fiber. Me? I'd just be happy with a home 10Gbit/s connection that didn't cost as much as a gaming PC, or more.