As gamers from around the world descend on the DreamHack festival in Sweden to play Minecraft, StarCraft, Battlefield 3, and much more over the course of four days, Cisco and Telia have supplied them all with a 120Gbps network, which they say is the fastest internet connection ever. The combination of Cisco's hardware and the Swedish ISP's fiber network is fast enough for you to download a movie in 47 thousandths of a second, and more than enough for the festival's estimated 20,000 attendees to use at once. (That's just the people attending in person — 2009 saw 200,000 participants from across the globe, and this year's expected to be even bigger.) The system relies on Cisco CRS-3 routers, which are capable of speeds up to a crazy 322Tbps — that's enough to allow all 1.3 billion people in China to conduct a video call at the same time, the company says.

A day into the gathering, DreamHack has already broken its record for broadband usage, at one point streaming 23.4Gbps through that ridiculous connection. The festival's still got plenty of gaming and hacking left to do, and Cisco's going to keep pushing that number even higher; it's been a part of events like this before, using broadband-hungry gamers to stress-test its latest tech. This type of speed is a long way from seeing the light of day for average users, but we're already salivating at the idea.

Thanks, johan!