Swedish provider Com Hem claims world record for fastest internet connection

Swedish service provider Com Hem AB has laid claim to having the fastest internet connection ever measured by a large group of users.

Com Hem provided the 1.6 terabit-per-second connection to a point of presence at this weekend's DreamHack Summer conference in Jönköping, Sweden. As to whether that's an actual record, Com Hem is awaiting verification from the Guinness World Records.

Com Hem hooked up a direct link from its backbone, which it also uses for its broadband customers, to the conference using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM). The 300 kilometer, which is roughly 186 miles, link between in Jönköping and Stockholm "was most likely the first time a connection this fast has been set up at such a long distance for this type of event," according the press release.

Com Hem said that 1.6 terabits per second corresponded to 16,000, 100 Mbit/s connections, which was the most frequently used broadband service delivered by Com Hem to Swedish households. At that speed, 5 million people can stream Spotify at the highest quality simultaneously, or 230,000 people could watch Netflix in HD simultaneously, and it would take less than one second to download 10 copies of Fortnite, one of the largest games in the market.

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While technical details weren't provided in regards to which vendors Com Hem works with, DWDM is primarily used to increased bandwidth over existing fiber networks, which may mean that the record, if verified, could be short-lived with the advent of newer optical transport network technologies.

For example, Nokia has said earlier this year that its Photonic Service Engine 3 (PSE-3) chipset could push fiber-optic performance close to the maximum theoretical limits at any distance.