The Swedish National Research and Education Network (Sunet), with carrier Sprint, claims to have broken the speed record for transferring large volumes of data across the internet.

Without using special technology, the team sent nearly 840 gigabytes of data from a PC in San José, California, roughly halfway around the globe to associates at the University of Lulea in northern Sweden in under 27 minutes.

The data was recorded as travelling 10,157 miles across Sprint's global SprintLink backbone and the GigaSunet IP backbone at 4.23Gbps.

Sunet claimed the result as "almost three times better" than the current record listed in the 2004 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, adding that the transfer also beat the previous record held by a technical consortium using a non-public advanced research network by 12 per cent.

According to the research organisation, the data speed trial occurred under real-world data transport conditions and has "meaningful implications for disaster recovery offsite storage applications".

Sunet chief technology officer Borje Josefsson said in a statement: "The amazing thing about our record versus others is that we have done this transmission on the production infrastructure in use by other GigaSunet and SprintLink customers."

The transmission path incorporated 40 IP routers, 35 in the SprintLink network and five in the Sunet network.

Off-the-shelf Dell 2650 servers acted as the end hosts, each with a single Intel Xeon 2.0GHz processor, 512MB of Ram and with the 2.0 version of the NetBSD operating system.

The PCs were connected to a GigaSunet core router at the University of Lulea in Sweden and to a Sprint access router in San José, using Intel PRO/10GbE 10-gigabit Ethernet adapters.

The achievement was verified by a land speed record judging committee of the Internet2 consortium of Indianapolis, which sponsors an ongoing data transmission speed contest for high bandwidth networks.