World’s Fastest Internet Comes To… Minneapolis

Minneapolis is to get what’s being billed as the world’s fastest broadband connection, a whopping 10 gigabits per second.

The service is available to around 30,000 homes and businesses in the city and is provided by US Internet. It already provides a gigabit service but has now flipped the switch to increase that ten-fold.

Although available to consumers, it’s probably mainly going to be taken up by businesses as it costs $399 a month. That’s great value on a per-megabit basis (the existing gigabit service is $65), but only if you plan to use it all.

The service offers the same speeds for uploads and downloads, so it seems the most likely target would be a business that deals with transferring very large files, has a lot of Internet users, or a combination of the two. At the moment only a “couple [of] thousand” people subscribe to the gigabit service, so the new package is likely to be a niche product for now.

Although this appears to be the fastest service offered commercially, a test project earlier this year did manage to achieve sustained transfers of 1.4 terabytes per second over a 255 mile cable. That involved some major tweaking to reduce the virtual space between the various transmission channels used over cables.

That’s not to say the new US Internet service is too shoddy however. 10 gigabits per second is fast enough that in theory at least you could download the content of a single-layer Blu-ray disc in 20 seconds.

[Image credit: Bobak Ha’Eri via Creative Commons licence]