Researchers in Japan have broken the record for the fastest internet speed ever recorded: 1.02 petabits per second. That’s fast enough to “download 67 million songs in a second.”

Contents
How Fast is 1.02 Petabits Per Second?How Did Japan Make This Happen?
When Can the World Expect to Use This?

According to FirstPost, this new speed could let someone download the entire Netflix library almost instantly—or stream millions of 8K videos at once without any buffering.

To give some perspective, Japan’s new speed is around 16 million times faster than India’s average internet speed of 63.55 Mbps and 3.5 million times faster than the U.S. average.

How Fast is 1.02 Petabits Per Second?

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A petabit is one million gigabits. So when researchers say they hit 1.02 petabits per second, they’re talking about a connection fast enough to transfer more than 100,000 HD movies in just one second.

This speed could technically download the full Netflix catalog in less than a second. Big game downloads, like the 150GB Call of Duty: Warzone, would finish in a flash.

According to Gagadget, the full English Wikipedia is about 100GB. At this speed, you could download it “10,000 times in just one second.”

Music platforms can’t even match the scale. Spotify says a minute of audio uses about 1MB. That means, “with Japan’s new speed, you could theoretically download 67 million songs in a second—that’s more than 1,27,000 years of continuous music.”

While these examples help show how fast this is, the real impact will likely be on emerging technology.

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Things like cloud computing, AI, autonomous vehicles, and real-time translation depend on large volumes of data moving quickly. With speeds like this, data centers in different parts of the world could work together almost as if they were on the same local network. That would allow global AI systems to run with almost no delay.

How Did Japan Make This Happen?

The breakthrough came from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), working with Sumitomo Electric and European partners.

The team sent data over 1,800 kilometers—about the distance from Delhi to Goa—using a specially built fiber-optic cable.

Typical fiber cables send data down a single path of light. This new design packs 19 separate cores into a standard-sized fiber, which researchers describe as “a 19-lane superhighway” for internet traffic. It increases capacity without requiring totally new infrastructure.

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Sumitomo Electric developed the cable, while NICT and international researchers built the transmission system.

To deal with long-distance signal loss, they used advanced amplification and signal processing. The setup involved 19 loops of fiber, each 86.1 km long, with the signal passed 21 times. That totaled 1,808 km, and during the test, “180 individual data streams were sent at record-breaking speed and stability.”

When Can the World Expect to Use This?

Most home internet is still measured in megabits per second, not terabits, much less talking about petabits. We’re far from seeing these speeds in everyday life. That means using this speed is not anytime soon.

Still, the breakthrough is getting attention from telecom companies, infrastructure providers, and governments. This could help shape the future of undersea cables, national internet backbones, and next-generation networks like 6G.

It may take years to reach consumers, but the progress points toward a future where fast, high-capacity internet becomes standard—not something rare.

(FirstPost/Tribune)