Japan has set a new world record for achieving the fastest internet speed, which is 16 million times faster than India’s average internet speed. Scientists at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have recorded a data transfer speed of 1.02 petabits per second (Pbps), which is said to download thousands of HD movies within seconds.
For reference, it is 16 million times faster than India’s average internet speed of around 63.55 Mbps and about 3.5 million times faster than the average speed in the United States. It is said to download the entire Netflix library, 8K videos, or even all of Wikipedia in just one second.
The Photonic Network Laboratory team at Japan’s NICT, with Sumitomo Electric and a group of international researchers, have created this super high-speed network using fibre optic cables. Interestingly, the cable used in the process is of the same size as the ones being used by internet providers. However, instead of a single core, the cable has 19 cores to send massive amounts of data across a distance of over 1,800 kilometres.
The scientists used a setup with transmitters, receivers, and looping circuits that carried the data at full power without any loss in speed.
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While this record-breaking speed is still limited to lab conditions, it hints at the ultra-fast internet infrastructure in the near future. This will be useful for cloud computing, video streaming, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
Currently, consumer devices like routers and phones aren’t built to handle such speeds. However, experts say this kind of internet speed could be used for high-capacity systems like data centres or undersea cables.
This is not the first time Japan has done something like this. Last year, too, the same research group set a speed record of 402 terabits per second.