Recently, ESnet (Energy Sciences Network), the highest-speed segment of the current Internet up to that point, has been updated to ESnet6, where the bandwidth is equal to 46 terabits per second. However, this update will not be available to regular users as the ESnet network is designed for scientific purposes only.

The first version of the ESnet network was created in 1986 to provide communication between several US Department of Energy laboratories scattered across the US. Since then, the network has been modernized and updated many times to keep up with the ever-increasing amount of data generated by scientific experiments. In 2021 alone, the amount of data transmitted over the ESnet network reached 1.1 exabytes.

Physically, the network consists of 24 thousand kilometers of fiber optic cables. Depending on the generation of equipment used, these cables provide transfer rates from 400 Gbit/s to 1 Tbit/s. As mentioned above, the ESnet network was the fastest segment of the Internet in practical use until the latest upgrade and has now firmly established itself in the leading position with its current speed of 46 Tbps.

To be fair, the highest data transfer rate of one petabit/second (1000 Tbit/s) was recently achieved on a Japanese installation, this is experimental and will never be used in practice.

Of course, scientists won’t be using the ESnet6 network to download all of Netflix, for example, when growing bacterial cultures. This network will enable real-time or near-real-time transmission of large datasets related to climate modeling, genome research, observations of space objects, physical experiments, quantum technologies and many other fields.