Japanese researchers just set a new milestone in internet speed, and it's one a little hard to fathom. Researchers say they transmitted data at over 125,000 gigabytes per second across a distance of 1,120 miles. To put that in perspective, Live Science notes that it's roughly 4 million times faster than the average US broadband connection and more than double the previous record set in 2024.
"What if you could download Netflix's entire library in under a second?" asks CNET. "How about every English language page on Wikipedia (including all revisions) five times over?" That's what is possible under the feat by the team at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, which presented their findings at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco. Their approach involved a newly developed optical fiber cable, which bundles 19 separate fibers into a single strand about as thick as a typical cable now in use. Unlike past designs, every fiber in the bundle interacts with light in the same way, reducing the usual fluctuations and minimizing data loss over long distances.
So why would such uber-fast speeds be necessary? It could help satisfy the world's ever-growing demand for data. "I'd say a high-end internet user has one-gig speeds right now," writes Joe Supan at CNET. "In a decade, it's not hard to imagine that being 10 Gigabits per second. To keep up with growing demand like that, we'll need a lot more records to be broken."
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