Japan achieves another internet speed record

Imagine if you could download anything on the Internet, like movies to video games instantly. The Land of the Rising Sun shines a light on that dream by achieving an internet speed record of 402,000,000 Mbps!

In contrast, Statista says the average global internet speed in 2023 was 46.8 Mbps. That means Japanese researchers had a connection that’s millions of times faster.

READ: OpenAI Japan officially opens

The best part is the country’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) managed this feat with commercially available optical fibers. Perhaps we could deploy this technology in other countries?

Japan’s current internet speed record vs. last year’s

Educational website Phys.org reported the NICT led an international joint research team to achieve an internet speed record of 402 terabits per second. 

As mentioned, they only used commercially available optical fibers and signal amplifiers. However, they employed as many transmission bands as possible to reach a total signal bandwidth of 37.6 THz. 

Video game news website PCGamer says that’s over 100,000 times more bandwidth than Wi-Fi 7 can provide. Tech firm Intel says Wi-Fi 7 is an internet industry standard. 

Japan’s latest achievement is 25% more than last year’s internet speed record. A 2023 Inquirer Tech article discussed that the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology achieved 22.9 petabits per second. 

Can you hook your computer or mobile device to this ultrafast internet connection? PCGamer says we can’t due to built-in limitations and bottlenecks.

For example, current top-tier motherboards have a rating of 10GbE or 10 Gbpgs, significantly slower than the NICT’s breakthrough. 

If you were able to solve this issue, your computer’s RAM and SSD can’t write data fast enough to keep up with the internet speed record. 

Nonetheless, the internet industry will follow this achievement closely. It could be the key to meeting the world’s ever-growing demand for data transmission.

Nowadays, all our devices are using AI, and that technology requires sending and receiving huge amounts of data quickly and repeatedly.

Soon, further research and development of this technology could make loading and booting times a thing of the past.