Scientists from Eindhoven have broken an online speed record. Never before has a digital file arrived at its destination so quickly. The information file reached a speed of 22.9 petabytes per second. Researcher Chigo Okonkwo from Eindhoven University of Technology compares it to ‘1 billion people watching Netflix streams at the same time’.
22.9 petabytes =
- 22,900 terabytes =
- 22,900,000 gigabytes =
- 22,900,000,000 megabytes
Okonkwo compares it to:
- About 20 times the global internet traffic per second.
- 229 times the maximum capacity of fiber optic cables currently in use
- 10 billion people making individual HD video calls. That’s more video calls than there are people on the planet.
The people of Eindhoven worked together with colleagues from Japan and Italy on the record. According to Okonkwo, such high-speed connections help more people connect to the internet. It also makes new applications possible, such as artificial intelligence. He calls that technology ‘bandwidth hungry’.
The old record was about half that, namely 10.66 petabytes per second. That was achieved in 2020.