Japan just shattered the internet speed record
Japan’s new internet speed record is so fast, it makes your home fibre look like dial-up…
A while back, we celebrated China unlocking 10G internet, with download speeds up to 10000 MB/s. Seems insane, right?
Well, Japan just shattered that record.
Imagine downloading the entire Netflix library (every show, every movie, every random rom-com you pretend not to watch) in 16 seconds.
Yup. 16. One-six.
That’s exactly what Japanese researchers have done.
They’ve broken the internet speed record in a way that makes your WiFi router look like it belongs in a museum.
Scientists at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have achieved a mind-melting 1.02 petabits per second.
If you’re not fluent in techno-jargon, let me translate: that’s 1,020,000 gigabits per second.
In human terms, that’s about 4.6 million times faster than the UK’s average internet speed of 223 megabits per second.
That’s not the craziest part though. They didn’t just pull this off in a tiny lab across the road.
The Metro reported that they managed to keep that speed up over a distance of 1,808 kilometres.
That’s basically Durban to Cape Town - with some change.
How did they pull this off?
With a little thing called a 19-core fibre cable.
While normal fibre cables use one light path, these clever humans squeezed 19 separate light paths into the same space.
It’s like fitting 19 lanes of traffic onto a single highway without a single accident. Genius.
What could you do with that kind of speed?
Oh, you know… casual stuff…
Like stream 10 million ultra-HD 8K videos at the same time.
You could download the entirety of Wikipedia in one second or instantly load massive AI models.
You could even stream VR and holographic videos like you’re living in Black Mirror.
So when do we get it?
Sadly - not anytime soon.
As you might’ve guessed, this isn’t something you’ll be plugging into your home router tomorrow.
The tech still needs refining before it becomes street-legal for us mere mortals.
Although the fact that it’s even possible now means the future of the internet is looking wild.
Fingers crossed Japan shares their secrets with the rest of the world!
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