Depending on where you go, your internet speeds may vary. There are, of course, many factors to take into account how fast your internet is, such as how many people are using it near you, what kind of modem/router you’re using, are you using WiFi or LAN, and so on, but still, we doubt that you would be able to achieve what Japan just did.Over the weekend, the country managed to break the internet speed record with a speed of 319 terabits per second. This is almost double what they had previously accomplished back in 2020 when they hit 178Tb/s. That is pretty crazy because to give you some context, that is roughly a few thousand movies in HD downloaded in a single second.
Now obviously this was done in a lab settings which means that the conditions are kind of perfect, so hitting those speeds in real life won’t be possible, at least not for the foreseeable future. In order to achieve those speeds, the researchers relied on fiber optic technology. They also used some experimental technology where instead of a single core inside of a fiber optic cable, this strand came with four cores which played a crucial role.
They also used a 552-channel comb laser firing at multiple wavelengths to push through amplifiers made of rare earth minerals. According to the researchers, “The 4-core [multi-core fibers] with standard cladding diameter is attractive for early adoption of [space division multiplexing] fibers in high-throughput, long-distance links, since it is compatible with conventional cable infrastructure and expected to have mechanical reliability comparable to single-mode fibers.”
