Scientists around the world

The median home-internet download speed in the US is currently ~248 megabits per second (Mbps). But work being done by researchers could soon pump those rookie numbers up.

Within the past year, the world has seen two major internet speed breakthroughs:

• October 2023: Japanese researchers successfully transferred data at 22.9 petabits per second – or enough bandwidth to supply every single person on the planet, and then a couple billion more, with a Netflix stream, Chigo Okonkwo at Eindhoven University of Technology, who was involved in the work, told the BBC.
• March 2024: UK researchers figured out a way to transfer data at a rate of 301 million Mbps utilizing existing network infrastructure.

Why so fast? It’s hard to imagine what the average person would want with these types of speeds (you can only download so many episodes of The Bachelorette, after all). But scientists are like Top Gun pilots: they feel the need, the need for speed.

For example: Every time one tiny subatomic particle smashes into another during experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the impact generates about one petabit per second worth of data – equivalent to ~500 billion pages of standard printed text (per👏second👏). 

• This is condensed for storage and study, but still requires hefty amounts of bandwidth. And these speed needs will only go up.

🌐📈 Looking ahead... Some of the breakthroughs by the Ricky Bobbys of the science world will trickle down to us normies – the World Broadband Association expects home broadband connections to reach up to 50 gigabits per second (50,000 Mbps) sometime around 2030.