Steam's entire library could be yours in 47 seconds with Japan's world record internet speed

What if you wanted to download your entire Steam Library, or perhaps the entire Steam Store? How long would it take you on your home internet connection? Weeks? Possibly years? Maybe even a decade? Japan could do it in a matter of seconds with their new insane internet speed that has broken the world record.

2

Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) broke the world record for the fastest internet speed by transmitting data a staggering 1.02 petabits per second, which, for those who don't know and understandably so, a petabit is, that's 1,020,000 gigabits per second. You could imagine this speed as seeing your download at 127,500,000 Megabytes per second (MB/s), or 127,500 GB/s. Yes, that is correct. 127,500 gigabytes per second download speed.

How was this speed achieved? NICT used standard-sized fiber optic cables that are typically used in many homes around the world, but the difference was that they were equipped with four cores and over 50 different wavelengths of light to transmit data. To add even more impressive statistics to this achievement, researchers were able to maintain this speed over 51.7 kilometers (32.12 miles), making these kind of speeds feasible for real-world infrastructure.

To bring it back to downloading the entire Steam Library, for those who don't know, it's estimated that Valve uses approximately 5 to 6 Petabytes to host Steam's entire library. At the NICT speeds, it would take just 47 seconds to download the entire library, including DLCs. That is, of course, if you could find some magical storage solution to write that data at those speeds.