China unveils world’s 1st internet speed capable of transferring ‘150 HD movies in 1 second’

About the tech: Unveiled Monday at a press conference at Tsinghua University, the “backbone network” is a collaboration between the university, China Mobile, Huawei Technologies and China Education and Research Network (CERNET) Corporation, according to the South China Morning Post. The project is part of China’s Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI), which launched in 2013.

Unprecedented speed: The backbone network defies expert prediction that an ultra-high-speed network of 1 terabit per second would not be available until 2025. The technology, named after how it forms a main data route between cities, has a speed of 1.2 terabit per second.

Such a speed makes it faster than the world’s internet backbone networks at 100 gigabits (GiB) (100,000 megabits) and the United States’ fifth-generation Internet2, which has a minimum speed of 400 gigabits per second. First activated in July, the 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) fiber-optic network covers Beijing in the north, Wuhan at the center and Guangzhou, a city in Guangdong province, in the south.

What developers are saying: Speaking at the press conference, FITI project leader Wu Jianping from the Chinese Academy of Engineering said the backbone network would give China the “advanced technology to build an even faster internet.” Meanwhile, Huawei Technologies Vice President Wang Lei said it has the capability to transfer “data equivalent of “150 high-definition films in just one second.”