In Australia, it’s probably best not to think about how fast the internet in other countries is. We’re lucky to get a solid connection at best and are only now just getting gigabit speeds from some providers — despite the NBN network being ‘complete’.
However, there is an internet speed world record out there and engineers in Japan just smashed it.
What is the new internet speed world record?
Brace yourselves because the new internet speed world record may destroy your soul.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, engineers in Japan from the National Institute of Information & Communication Technology (NICT) achieved a new internet speed record of 319 terabits per second.
What’s even better is that they managed to maintain this insane speed over a large distance of 3000km with no drop-off.
That’s almost double the 178 Tb/s world record that was set in 2020 by engineers from the UK and Japan.
To achieve this landmark speed, the NITC engineers used optical fibres and utilised their special knowledge of lasers to get successful results. The team used a 552-channel comb laser and fibre amplifiers that were doped in thulium and erbium. This was then distributed by Raman amplification.
I won’t pretend to know what all that means but it did get that it’s some insanely fast internet so can we get some of that here, please?
Apparently, the engineers said that the fibre infrastructure that’s in place now could support these sorts of speeds with a few modifications, which should make it easier to install in the future.
How does Australia compare?
It’s no secret that Australia is not even close to landing these sorts of speeds right now.
The ACCC recently released a report revealing that NBN 1000 is nowhere near as fast as it should be and the Australian government only recently decided that full-fibre internet is the way to go.
On the internet world speed index, Australia rates quite highly amongst other countries for cellular data connections. However, we rank 57th in the world for fixed broadband internet according to Speedtest.net data.
We can hardly get 1 gigabit per second in Australia, can you imagine 300 terabits? It’s good to have dreams I guess.
*Correction: An earlier version of this story quoted the internet speed record as 319 terabytes instead of 319 terabits per second. We apologise for the error.