Japan sets record for the fastest internet on the planet3 min read

Reading Time: 2 minutes

How fast is the internet in your home? I’m sure you’ve heard conversations your parents have had with internet service providers about choosing a high-speed connection. Well, whatever speed you have right now is pretty fast, since you can stream and watch an endless number of videos online. But how fast can the internet actually be?

Well, we now have the answer. Japan recently set a new internet speed world record. Scientists at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) sent data at 319 Tbps (terabytes per second), twice as fast as the previous record, which was at 179 Tbps! In comparison, the average speed of home internet is between 50-100 Mbps.

NICT managed this incredible record by upgrading the technology across the space and using four-cour fiber-optic lines. Fiber Optic cables transmit data using light and not electricity. This makes them considerably faster than internet cables or other methods.

Owliver’s Obscure Observation: Terabytes (TB), Gigabytes (TB) and Megabits per second (Mbps) are units of measurement of data storage. For example, a 64 GB iPhone can store up to 20,000 photos and 160+ hours of video. Conversion: 1 TB = 1,024 GB and 1 GB = 1,000 Mbps.

How does the internet reach our homes?

For the internet to reach your home, you need to have a service provider. They provide you access to their cell towers, which transport the data wirelessly to your router.

When your router receives the data, it transports it throughout your home. All the devices you use are connected to this router. When you use Google or your web browser to search the globe for results, the router tells the data center where you are and what you searched. This data center then delivers the right search results to where you are in less than a second. But for the search to occur correctly, both bits of information are necessary.

Imperfection is the key to…. the internet

The internet isn’t perfect though. Mishaps with your Wi-Fi could slow your search efficiency. The search then takes longer to load and does not even work. This could happen when too many people are connected to the router. It could also happen if you are too far away from it.

Based on your plan, the internet service provider will send the same data speed to everyone. But, depending on how far away you are from the cell tower, and how many people are using the cell tower, your internet speed could slow down.

Although wireless data is a lot more convenient, it is not going to give your home the fastest speed. Through cables, the data speed is much higher.

Why is my home internet so slow?

If all that information got you thinking about why you’re settling for less, it’s possibly because your internet still does everything you need at that rate. Also, it’s extremely expensive to create internet speeds that high, and so, your data bills could be notoriously high. But can our data speed get any faster than it is now? Yes, with the addition of 5G, our data speeds can be a whole lot faster.