NTT Communications Corporation announced on January 13 that it has increased the data-transmission capacity of its Global IP Network between the United States and Japan to 400 gigabits per second (Gbps).

The new capacity is equivalent to approximately 24,000 channels of digital terrestrial television or about 3.5 centuries' worth of content in a daily newspaper.

NTT Com's global IP backbones are connected to fixed and mobile telecom companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), data center operators and content providers. NTT Com has expanded bandwidth sevenfold compared to just five years ago. The current jump from 300 Gbps to 400 Gbps was achieved in less than one year.

NTT Com launched the precursor of its current Global IP Network Service with a 45 megabits per second (Mbps) service in 1997. U.S. - Japan bandwidth was dramatically increased to 1 Gbps when the company acquired Verio and its Tier-1 IP backbone in 2000. NTT Com became the first network provider to measure network-latency variability with a jitter-type service level agreement (SLA) in 2005. The company's Global IP Network was tested in December 2006, when network traffic was rerouted with minimal delay following a destructive undersea earthquake off Taiwan. In 2008, the company introduced a traffic-analysis system that monitors network traffic to detect and report traffic anomalies to IP network operators.