Engineers Achieved Internet Speeds of 22 Petabits Per Second on a Single Fiber

The fastest home internet connections currently top out at around 10 gigabits per second. In 2023, researchers at Japan's NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology) demonstrated a transmission rate that is 2.3 million times faster: 22.9 petabits per second, on a single optical fiber.

What Does That Even Mean?

• One petabit = 1 million gigabits
• 22.9 petabits/second = enough to stream 8K video to every person on Earth simultaneously
• You could download Netflix's entire 14-petabyte content library in about 5 seconds
• You could transmit the contents of every printed book in human history in about 5 milliseconds

How They Did It

The team used a multi-core fiber with 4 cores (rather than the usual 1) and combined techniques including wavelength-division multiplexing across the C, L, and S bands of the optical spectrum, with up to 749 distinct wavelengths transmitting simultaneously.

Such speeds will likely never reach individual homes — there's no need. But they are essential for the spine of the internet, for AI training clusters that move terabytes per second, and for connecting cities of millions on a single fiber pair.