From the article: America's fastest internet has become faster. The Department of Energy's (DOE) dedicated science network, ESnet (Energy Science Network), has been upgraded to ESnet6, boasting a staggering bandwidth of 46 Terabits per second (Tbps). Before you get any ideas, hold up. For now, it's strictly for scientists.

"ESnet6 represents a transformational change in the way networks are built for research, with improved capacity, resiliency, and flexibility," ESnet executive director Inder Monga said in a press release. "Together, these new capabilities make it faster, easier, and more efficient for scientists around the world to conduct and collaborate on ground-breaking research."

ESnet was established in 1986, and over the past 35 years, the network has served as the "data circulatory system" for the DOE from the Berkeley Lab. It connects all of its national laboratories, tens of thousands of DOE-funded researchers, and DOE's premier scientific instruments and supercomputing centers.

The network has had several upgrades and transmitted 1.1 exabytes of data over the network in 2021. According to the statement, traffic on ESnet increases by a factor of ten every four years.

To compare, you could be getting by on a few hundred Megabits per second (Mbps), while ESnet6 is equivalent to 46 million Mbps, according to the New Atlas.

Even if you're on a 10 Gbps fiber connection, which is the fastest internet speed available to consumers, ESnet6 has you beat 46,000 times over.

ESnet6 is made up of 15,000 miles (24,000 km) of fiber optic cables spanning the country, enabling network backbone links that can each transfer data between 400 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and 1 Tbps for record-time transfers. Though it set the record for the fastest internet network in the world, it isn't a record data transmission speed. An experimental setup in Japan, which achieved a speed of 1 Petabit per second (PBPs), which is 1,000 Tbps, has bagged the honor for the same.