Rewrite this title for a blog post. Remove any site names from it The title is: Download Baldur's Gate 3 in less than… 4 milliseconds?! The record for the fastest internet connection has just been broken

Watch Baldur's Gate 3 on GOG

Games are getting heavier and heavier

Connection speed has always been a pretty important selling point for video game players. Indeed, whether it is to play online or to broadcast your game live on the internet thanks to Twitch or YouTube, it is essential to have a very good connection at the risk of suffering major slowdowns. Since the arrival of optical fiber, however, it is becoming more and more common to have a stable connection that is fast enough to meet many needs without too many problems (even if it is obviously not perfect yet). However, the speed of the internet connection has become important again for a completely different challenge in recent years: the weight of video games.

Indeed, you will surely have noticed that contemporary AAAs are increasingly heavy. Today, it is not uncommon to have to download more than 100 GB to install a video game on your machine, whether you are on PC, PS5 or Xbox Series. Worse still, games increasingly require you to download everything from the internet on the day of release, with the disc almost only serving as proof of purchase. In addition to requiring HDDs or SDDs with a significant capacity, this problem also requires you to have a solid connection if you want to be able to enjoy your new purchase as quickly as possible. On this subject, A new record has just been broken in Japan, and it should make you jealous.

An astronomical record that is unlikely to happen to you

Depending on the quality of your fiber optic or any other internet offer, your download speed should be somewhere between a few Mb/s and several hundred Mb/s. Depending on where you are on this scale, downloading a game as heavy as Baldur's Gate III (over 100 GB) should therefore take you between several hours and a few dozen minutes, which still changes a lot of things. But did you know that a new internet connection speed record has just been broken? In Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology revealed that a team of technicians had managed to achieve a connection speed of 402 terabits per second. In addition to breaking the previous record (321 Terabits per second in October 2023, 226 Terabits per second in March 2022), this means thatThey could download Baldur's Gate III in just 4 milliseconds. A dream soon within reach? Not really.

The thing to understand about this record is that it was set under conditions that absolutely surpass any configuration you could get at home. First, enabling such speeds for home use would require an absolutely staggering server load, which would at the very least increase your bills by several hundred euros, not to mention the energy and environmental impact. Second, even if you could have access to such connection speed, you would also be limited by your hardware. Indeed, the motherboards currently sold on the market do not allow you to receive such a speed, not to mention the capacities of your RAM or your SSD. As you will have understood, This record was broken in very specific conditions which are purely a matter of technological prowess and which are unlikely to happen again in your country any time soon. While we wait to reach such a connection speed, we hope at least that video games will start to slow down a bit.