Imagine standing in front of the world’s largest library – every book ever written, every movie ever made, every song ever recorded, every video ever streamed. Now imagine reaching out your hand, and in the blink of an eye, gathering it all into your pocket. That is roughly what Japan has just achieved.
Last month, researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) quietly unveiled a scientific feat that reads like the climax of a futuristic novel: an internet speed of 1.02 petabits per second. To put it plainly, that is 1,020,000 gigabits per second. But such numbers are too large for the human mind to grasp.
So let’s try.
If you were to download every single game available on Steam, from Counter-Strike 2 to Baldur’s Gate 3, you could do it before you finish reading this sentence. Or picture it this way: at this speed, you could stream 10 million 8K ultra-HD videos simultaneously. Enough to provide a high-quality movie stream to every single resident of Tokyo and New York City – at the same time.
It is faster than imagination. Faster than curiosity. Faster than the human ability to realise what has just been achieved.
A fibre the size of a hair – carrying a universe
The mind-bending part of this innovation is that it wasn’t built using alien technology or brand new infrastructure. Instead, the NICT team used standard-sized fibre optic cables with a twist: they fitted four cores inside instead of one, and transmitted data across more than 50 distinct light wavelengths. The result was a bandwidth so vast it almost erases the idea of bandwidth itself.
Think of it like replacing a single-lane village road with a four-lane hyperloop, all inside the same thin hair-width cable you see snaking under your street. In a parallel breakthrough by another Japanese team, a 19-core fibre was used to transmit the same 1.02 petabit speed over an eye-watering distance of 1,808 kilometres (1,118 miles) – roughly the journey from Mumbai to Delhi and back.
The researchers designed special amplifiers to boost the signals across all 19 cores without interference, and processed them using MIMO-based digital clean-ups at the other end. The result: a record-breaking capacity-distance product of 1.86 exabits per second-km, the highest ever achieved in optical fibre communications.
Why does this matter?
Because the world is about to explode with data.
AI models are already scraping every publicly available word and image. Autonomous vehicles will soon be mapping every inch of every road in real time. The metaverse, real-time VR, and holographic calls aren’t dreams anymore – they’re waiting for the bandwidth to catch up. Even the upcoming 6G networks will demand data speeds that today’s infrastructure cannot handle.
At Japan’s new speeds, data centres across continents could be linked as if they were in the same room. Cloud computing would function like local computing. AI processing could become truly global and instantaneous.
To illustrate: this internet speed could download 127,500 years of music in a single second, or back up the entire content of Wikipedia 10,000 times in that same second.
In other words, it is not just about streaming Netflix’s entire library faster than it takes to launch the app. It is about changing the nature of what data means to us – from something we store and retrieve, to something that simply exists, accessible anytime, anywhere, without delay.
Will you get it at home tomorrow?
Sadly, no. Terabit-level internet is still a dream for consumers. For now, such speeds will power the undersea cables that keep the world’s digital economy alive, the national broadband backbones that fuel innovation, and the private networks that keep governments, banks, and telecom giants ahead in the global arms race of data.
But this achievement sets the blueprint for the internet of tomorrow. An internet that doesn’t pause to buffer, doesn’t collapse under billions of devices, and doesn’t limit what we can create, process, or imagine.
Japan’s record is a quiet reminder that technological progress often happens far from public gaze, in labs where scientists decide the fate of the future. The next time your 4G signal buffers, remember that somewhere in the world, a group of researchers just achieved a data speed that makes the concept of buffering itself feel like cave paintings in a world of digital renaissance.
Because in the end, the ultimate question this breakthrough asks is not how fast can the internet go?
It is – how fast can we dream?
