Researchers have more than doubled the world speed record for internet data transfer.

Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland sent the equivalent of a full-length DVD movie in about seven seconds.

Colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) received the data.

The land record was set on Oct. 1 by transferring 1.1 terabytes of data over a 7,000-kilometre link in less than 30 minutes, the team said.

The average transfer rate was 5.44 gigabits per second (Gbps), which broke the previous record of 2.38 Gbps – more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.

Researchers announced the record on Thursday at the Internet2 conference in Indianapolis.

Scientists want to transfer data more quickly for several experiments, such as simulations of the Big Bang.

"This new record marks another major milestone towards our final goal of abolishing distances and, in so doing, to enable more efficient worldwide scientific collaboration," said Oliver Martin in a release.

Martin is head of external networking at CERN.

To accomplish the feat, the team paid for a special transatlantic fibre optic link with a capacity of 10 Gbps.

Routers at both ends allowed the data to be sent more reliably.