Download all of Netflix in one second? Japan’s new internet speed makes it possible

What if you could download every single movie and show on Netflix in just one second? No loading screens, no buffering, no “Your internet is unstable” pop-ups. Sounds like something from the future, right? But it’s already a reality in Japan.

A team of researchers in Japan has just set a new world record for internet speed. They reached a mind-boggling speed of 1.02 petabits per second. That’s fast enough to download the entire Netflix library, 8K videos, or even all of Wikipedia thousands of times over in just one second.

To give you an idea of how fast that really is, it’s about 16 million times faster than India’s average internet speed and 3.5 million times faster than what people in the US usually get.

This breakthrough came from scientists at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, or NICT. They worked with Sumitomo Electric and a group of international researchers to create a super high-speed network using fiber optic cables. But here’s the cool part,  the cable they used is the same size as the ones we already use today. The difference is on the inside. Instead of a single core, it has 19 cores, which means it can carry a lot more data at once.