- By Prateek Levi
- Fri, 11 Jul 2025 02:56 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Japan has officially established a new world standard in internet speed, recording a staggering 1.02 petabytes per second—that's about 1 million gigabytes per second. The achievement translates to the fact that, in theory, you could download a whole digital library in seconds.
The record-breaking speed was achieved by researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), and it's now the fastest internet speed ever recorded in the world, according to Business Today.
Built on Existing Fibre Technology
What's most impressive about the achievement is that it was not done in a laboratory under controlled conditions or with specialised gear. Rather, the scientists used conventional-sized fibre optic cables, upgraded with four cores and more than 50 light wavelengths to drive data at speeds never before seen.
Even more remarkably, this scorching speed was sustained over a length of 51.7 kilometres, indicating that the technology is scalable and could possibly become commercially viable in the future.
What This Does to Technology and Everyday Life
Ordinary consumers won't be experiencing petabyte-level internet speeds anytime soon, but the possible effect is gigantic. Such speeds would revolutionise:
- Artificial Intelligence by bringing data processing time down by orders of magnitude
- Cloud computing with almost instant data retrieval
- Generative AI applications relying on mass data access
- Autonomous cars and real-time translation devices, which need instant processing of information
In sheer numbers, this velocity would make it possible to stream more than 10 million 8K videos concurrently or make 10,000 copies of all of Wikipedia in one second. The entire Netflix library would be downloaded in seconds.
When Can You Expect This Speed?
While there is enthusiasm, don't anticipate this super-speedy internet coming to your living room any time soon. The technology will first prove beneficial to government agencies, data centre operators, and telecom operators initially. Public deployment would likely still be years down the road.
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But this much is clear: Japan's accomplishment is a giant step forward, not only in internet speed but in what will be possible for future global connectivity.
