A new speed record has been set for data transmission through an existing, commercially installed fibre-optic cable, with 450 terabits per second – or 450,000,000,000,000 bits per second – being beamed through a pair of cables underneath London’s busy streets. Polina Bayvel at University College London and her colleagues achieved the record using existing fibre-optic cables running from their laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data centre in Canary Wharf, then back again. That rate of data...