What If You Had NASA's Internet Speed? (97 000 mbp/s)

download the entire game of pubg in about 0. 003 seconds 91 000 megabits per second that's how fast the internet speed is at nasa and it's roughly about 4 000 times faster than the internet bandwidth required to watch this youtube video in hd while the rest of us send data across the public internet nasa uses a shadow network called esnet short for energy science network a set of private pipes that has demonstrated cross-country data transfers of 91 gigabits per second the fastest of its type ever recorded but what would happen if you were to have close to 100 000 megabit per second internet speed at home well firstly we need to understand how fast is the current internet speed that we all have in 2002 over 60 percent of the world's population has some sort of internet connection and the median worldwide internet speed is roughly 2 000 times slower than the speed at nasa the average download speed ranges from 12 to 25 megabits per second and that's what most people have in the us so when an average person like you opens up a website online it takes their computer approximately 2. 9 seconds to load that website that means if you were to visit nasa headquarters and use one of their supercomputers the speed at which you would open a website like facebook would be reduced by 2000 times to only 0.

0 seconds or 1 millisecond right wrong you see the internet bandwidth refers to how much data your internet connection can transmit the more bandwidth you have the more data you can load at once so where's the catch well when it comes to loading a website as long as your speed is well average it doesn't really matter how fast it really is if the website on the other end can't give you enough data for transferring in the first place a recent study found that upgrading to 10 megabits per second from 5 only speeds up page load times by about five percent so does that mean that having a speed of nearly 100 000 megabits per second would make no difference to an average consumer well there are some other important things in life other than loading websites for example downloading a large file a movie or a video game you see when it comes to internet speed the easiest way to measure how much of a chad you really are is to download the entire game of pubg in about 0. 003 seconds or the whole library of steam games that are available on the entire platform in just about 15 days that's assuming you have 15 petabytes of storage laying around in your back garden okay but how is it even possible to have that kind of internet speed at home you see information can be transferred in quite a few ways over an ethernet connection the most common being the land cable which is actually capable of a maximum speed of 10 000 megabits and that's 10 times less than what we're aiming for so how can we increase that to nasa level well there is actually another type of cable that is capable of achieving speeds way beyond your typical land cable and you can probably imagine how extremely massive hard to manufacture and difficult to install it is even for big corporations let alone people like you and me right wrong the cable is actually really thin and it's called the fiber optic cable what makes this cable different is the way it transfers data and that's using light fiber optics can transmit more data faster and more reliably than copper wires making for a more secure and most importantly faster way of getting information from one place to another the theoretical internet speed capacity of fiber is somewhere north of one petabit per second that's one billion megabits plenty enough to cover the speed of nasa's internet now that we've established that it's possible to have that kind of internet speed at home and got ourselves a fiber cable in place we can talk about what we can do with our 100 000 megabits per second and 100 000 is a lot so much so that you would be able to give 50 000 people each a computer running off of the same internet cable and all of them would be able to stream netflix in hd without experiencing any lag or stuttering such internet speed is really difficult to imagine and compare with everyday tasks that we do online so who would even want to have such a fast internet while most isps offer speeds of up to 100 megabits some 1000 but no one actually gives 100 000 and that's because no one would actually buy it except maybe nasa isps already offer a wide choice for consumers when it comes to internet speed and they do that because not everyone obviously needs the fastest bandwidth and not everybody has the budget to afford it a family with two children that enjoy gaming after school may choose to get 100 megabits whereas someone living alone and just reading some news articles online could just do fine with 10.