A new world internet speed record has been set, and it’s about six million times faster than the Australian average.
A team from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has managed to reach a speed of 402 terabits per second, breaking their previous record of 321 terabits per second, which they set in 2023.
The average internet speed in Australia is around 66 Mbps (megabits per second), according to Speedtest.net.
What is the fastest internet speed in the world?
One terabyte is equal to one trillion bits, so the speed recorded by the NIST team is 402 million megabits per second.
At this speed, 12,500 movies can be downloaded in about one second.
“If the average download speed in the world is, say, 100 megabits per second, our data rate is already four million times faster than that,” said Ben Putnam, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Information Technology.
He said a 402Tbps connection was unlikely to be used in a home. Instead, it would likely be placed “at the heart of the network.”
“You can think of it as a big data pipe that can connect four million homes, each with 100 megabits per second, for example,” he added.
If a 3 Mbps connection is needed to stream a movie on Netflix, a 402 Tbps connection could support 130 million simultaneous streams, Putnam said.
Players can also expect a seamless VR experience when playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Call of Duty.
How do Australian internet speeds compare internationally?
According to Speedtest.net, the global average download speed for fixed broadband internet is 93.93 Mbps.
By this measure, this new record speed is several million times faster than the speed we get at home in Australia.
At 66.58Mbps, Australia ranked 82nd on SpeedTest’s June index of fixed broadband speeds worldwide, behind Oman and the Czech Republic and just above Uzbekistan.
Australia performed better in mobile internet speeds – coming in 22nd place with a speed of 94.28 Mbps, behind Croatia and Estonia.
The average mobile internet speed in the world is 56.43 Mbps.
Will it be possible for Australians to access speeds of 402 Tbps?
Although the latest world record was set using standard commercially available optical fiber, the speed test took place under ideal laboratory conditions.
Commercial deployment of the technology that would enable such speeds won’t be available to your ISP anytime soon.
In addition to researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the team that achieved the record included academics from the Institute of Photonics Research at Aston University in the United Kingdom and researchers from Nokia Bell Labs in the United States.
