Japan's Internet Is So Fast, It Can Download All Of Netflix In 1 Second
It's not just the high-speed rail network, the best airports and earthquake-resistant buildings. Japan has added another feather to its infrastructural cap - it now boasts the world's fastest Internet. Researchers achieved a blazing speed of 1.02 petabits per second, fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in the blink of an eye.
To put things in context, the country's web browsing and downloading speed is 16 million times faster than India's average internet speed of 63.55 Mbps and 3.5 million times faster than the average internet connection in the US, according to a report by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
The Photonic Network Laboratory team at Japan's NICT, in collaboration with Sumitomo Electric and European Partners, took the gargantuan leap in technology. It is the world's fastest network and sends data over a long distance of 1,808 km per second using a special fibre optic cable with 19 cores.
It is also estimated that with Japan's new internet speed, one could download the entire English Wikipedia 10,000 times in just one second. Wikipedia in English is said to take up about 100 GB of space, as per Gagadget. You can also download 8K videos within a second.
The optic fibre cable is the same size as the ones we already use in our current internet infrastructure. It is 0.125 mm thick. The total data sent over distance was 1.86 exabits per second times kilometres, the highest ever achieved. So, it has proved that this ultra-fast network can run on today's installed cables, according to NICT.
Sumitomo Electric has designed the optical fibre cable, while NICT has built the transmission system in collaboration with an international team.
Researchers at NICT used transmitters, receivers and 19 looping circuits, each 86.1 km long. The signals passed through these loops 21 times, covering a total of 1,808 km and carrying 180 data streams at record-breaking speed and distance.
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