China is claiming to have the world's first "ultra-high-speed next-generation internet backbone" running "stably and reliably."

As Bloomberg reports, a joint development between Tsinghua University, Huawei, China Mobile, and CERNET.com Corporation established a transmission network spanning over 3,000km (1,860 miles), which links the three cities of Beijing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou. The bandwidth of this link is 1.2 terabits per second.

The ultra-high-speed network has been operational since July 31 and is being touted as a "major technological achievement" of the national Future Internet Technology Infrastructure (FITI) project. The aim of FITI is to use IPv6-only technology to link 40 universities spread across 35 cities and create an open research and test platform for the country.

The Tsinghua University press release states all the software and hardware used to create the network was developed domestically, including a next-generation internet core router.

While this new network is certainly very fast, it's by no means the fastest we've ever seen. Back in 2021, engineers in Japan obliterated the internet speed world record by achieving 178 terabits per second with no speed drop-off over a distance of 1,865 miles. Such a feat makes this FITI project look slow in comparison.

More recently, researchers in Europe developed an efficient way to achieve 1.8 petabits per second using a single chip and a laser system. Although just an experiment, the good news is that the technology is scalable.