There’s a new record for internet speed

If you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll remember the sound of your computer screaming as it tried to connect to the internet using a 56k dial-up modem that might work if you had Winsock configured properly. Some of us had access to ISDN lines through work or school–and lemme tell, you for a while, they were the sh*t.

Then came cable modems with ever-increasing speeds followed by fibre. I just checked my speed as I wrote this and my cable company has connected me at 1.2 GB/sec. If faster fibre was available in my neighbourhood, I’d have that which might get me to, what, 10 GB/sec? That would be lovely.

But that’s nothing. Researchers in Japan have set a new world record for internet speed. The National Institute of Information and Communications just transmitted date at 1.02 petabits per second. That’s 1,020,000 gigabits. Every. Single Second.

How fast is that? Fast enough to:

• Download 1,270,500 years of music–roughly equivalent to 67,000,000 songs–in less than a second.
• Download ALL of Netflix–every single bit of audio and video–in about one second.
• Download every video game available on Steam in one second.
• Stream 10,000,000 8K videos at the same time.
• Download all of Wikipedia (approximately 100 GB) 10,000 times in one second.

But they couldn’t have used standard off-the-shelf gear, right? Yes. Yes, they did. They used standard fibre-optic cables, the kind you might have running to your home right now. And the speed wasn’t measured from one side of the lab to another. They were able to maintain transmission at this speed over almost 52 kilometres. In other words, it works.

When will we see it in our homes? Well…

Read more at Business Day.