New Internet speed record announced by scientists:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat, doubling the previous top speed, was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kms of network between Geneva and a partner body in California.

CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.

This is more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, and is also equivalent to transferring a 60-minute compact disc within one second — an operation that takes around eight minutes on standard broadband.

Using current technology, a DVD — or digital video disc — film of some 90 minutes length takes some 15 minutes to download from the Internet. [Reuters]