Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp with the latest development:

The new optic-fiber technology will increase communication speeds to one gigabyte per second, up from 100 megabytes per second now available for homes and offices, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said in its evening edition.

The technology developed by NTT, Japan's largest telecoms operator, will make the downloading of movies and games from the Internet easier and give access to faster communications at a low cost, Nihon Keizai said in its report without quoting specific sources.

The faster communication speed would mean that a two hour long piece of video footage could be sent or received in 30 seconds [Reuters]