The fastest Internet network in the US just got a little faster. ESnet has been upgraded to ESnet6 and is now
ESnet (English)The Energy Sciences Network is a high-speed computer network serving U.S. Department of Energy scientists and their staff around the world. It is run by members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The very first version of ESnet was createdin 1986 to connect scientists from various Department of Energy laboratories throughout the United States. The network allowed them to quickly exchange huge amounts of raw data. Over the past decades, ESnet has been updated many times to keep up with technological advances and be able to transmit the enormous amount of data obtained from scientific experiments. In 2021, 1.1 exabytes of data were transferred over the network.
An exabyte is a unit of information, equal to 10¹⁸ bytes.
ESnet6 consists of dedicatedfiber-optic cables with a length of 24 000 km, which stretch across the whole country and& provide the backbone channels of the network. Each of them transmits data at speeds ranging from 400 gigabits per second (Gbps) to 1 Tbps. It was already the fastest internet network in the world, but now it has extended its lead with bandwidth up to 46 Tbps.
However, this is not a record transfer speed.data—that honor goes to an experimental facility in Japan that achieved a mind-blowing speed of 1 petabit per second (Pbps) or 1,000 Tbps.
In comparison, a typical user canafford a few hundred megabits per second (Mbps), while ESnet6 is equivalent to 46 million Mbps. A fiber optic connection with a speed of 10 Gbps is the highest Internet speed available to consumers. In this case, the advantage of ESnet6 is 46 000 times.
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