Featured Image Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
Topics: Technology, Japan
Britt Jones
Japan’s network is no joke, and if you could download at the speed of the average Japanese citizen, you’d be smug too.
Japan has been ahead of the game when it comes to innovation for so many years that it’s embarrassing to the rest of the world to not have caught up yet.
From its high-speed network rail to its earthquake defying buildings, there’s nothing they haven’t improved throughout the decades. But its internet is probably the most useful thing for the day-to-day running of things.
While it takes me hours to download games, renter videos, or attempt to do work with an intermittent signal, Japan could easily download Netflix’s entire library in a blink of an eye.
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This is because they boast speeds of 1.02 petabits- making it the fastest internet in the whole world.
Just to make it easier for you to imagine, think of your internet speed, and times it by 3.5 million.
The US’s average internet speed is 242 Mbps, according to a report by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), making Japan so far above us in the internet technology department.
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It was created when the Photonic Network Laboratory team at Japan's NICT, joined forces with Sumitomo Electric and European Partners, to make the world's fastest network.
Achieving this, they were able to make an internet which sends data over 1,808 km per second using a special fiber optic cable with 19 cores.
The optic fiber cable is the same size as what’s currently used in the industry, measuring at 0.125 mm thick.
However, the total data sent across the large distance was 1.86 exabits per second times kilometres, which is the highest ever achieved in history.
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Sumitomo Electric designed the optical fiber cable, and NICT built the transmission system, using transmitters, receivers and 19 looping circuits, 86.1 km long.
The signals then passed through the loops 21 times to carry 180 data streams to its destination.
If talking about Netflix downloads isn’t enough to convince you of how fast it really is, it’s estimated to be able to download the entire English Wikipedia 10,000 times in just one second, which would take about100 GB of space, as per Gagadget.
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As for downloading 8k videos, that also takes a second.
You could also download Steam’s entire game library which is around 1.2 petabytes within 10 seconds.
Now, if you felt up to it, you could even stream 10 million 8K videos at once with the internet in Japan.
Perhaps you’re a music lover? Then you could download 1,27,500 years' worth of music in a blink of an eye, which would give you one hell of a playlist that you’d never be able to complete.
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Obviously, it begs the question of when we can expect this back home…and you’re not going to like the answer.
The truth is that it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon as the US just isn’t on the same level as Japan in regard to innovating its internet connection.
So, maybe instead you could travel overseas and get a taste of it for yourself?