An internet connection with the ‘fastest ever’ broadband capable of transmitting 44 high-definition movies in just one second at 1.4Tb/s has been successfully achieved during a test in London.

Speed test conducted jointly by British Telecom (BT) and Alcatel-Lucent, a French networking equipment company, has raised hopes of more efficient data transfer via existing infrastructure avoiding any kind of costly upgrades.

Alcatel-Lucent and BT said that during their joint test broadband speed of around 1.4 terabits per second were achieved which is fast enough to send 44 uncompressed HD films per second.

The test was conducted over an existing 410km fibre link between the BT Tower in London and Ipswich.

Previously such faster internet speeds have only been measured in labs, but this is the first time that such a fast internet connection has been achieved using “real world” conditions.

Chief executive of the broadband analyst firm Point Topic, Oliver Johnson, said “BT and Alcatel-Lucent are making more from what they’ve got.”

“It allows them to increase their capacity without having to spend much more money.”

Researchers used a new “flexigrid” infrastructure, which created an “alien super channel” made up of seven 200 gigabits per second (Gbps) channels, to vary the gaps between transmission channels. Increasing the channels’ density resulted in a 42.5 percent increase in the efficiency of data transmission compared with current standard networks.

Kevin Drury, optical marketing leader at Alcatel-Lucent, told BBC news that the test was aimed at reducing space between lanes on a busy highway, enabling more lanes of traffic to flow through the same path. He said that while wide lines can encompass heavy data transfers such as streaming video, narrow lanes would be assigned for low-data transfers such as standard web page.