The fastest Internet network in the world, hosted at the United States Department of Energy, has just received an upgrade to ESnet6, which brings it to an astonishing bandwidth of 46 Terabits/s. The network will be dedicated exclusively to science, and will boost the speed at which new discoveries can be developed and communicated between nodes.

For context, the average household can receive 1 Gigabit/s internet, which is blazing fast and means you can often download movies in mere seconds; however, most households utilize a more modest around 100 Megabits/s speed. This makes ESnet6 a cool 460,000 times faster than most people’s current Internet, and it could download around 11,500 HD movies per second.  

“As scientific instruments grow in complexity and supercomputers simulate scientific phenomena at higher resolutions, the science community is facing a growing challenge: data volumes that are increasing exponentially, coupled with the need to move, share, and process this data globally and faster than ever before,” said Barbara Helland, Associate Director of the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, in a statement. 

“With ESnet6, DOE researchers are equipped with the most sophisticated technology to help tackle the grand challenges we face today in areas like climate science, clean energy, semiconductor production, microelectronics, the discovery of quantum information science, and more.”