Superfast gigabit internet has reached Maltese shores, with Valletta, Sliema and St Julian's homes and businesses first to be given access to the blazing speeds.
Melita's GigaPower service offers internet at speeds reaching a maximum of 1024 Mbps, theoretically allowing you to download a high-definition movie in 30 seconds.
The new service, currently only available in the capital, St Julian's and Sliema, will eventually be made available to the entire island. It is powered by technology by network behemoth Cisco, using Melita's fibre-coax infrastructure.
“So far there are very few ISPs in Europe, that are able to offer such bandwidth,” said Melita CEO Harald Roesch.
Mr Roesch noted that the European Commission has set a 2025 target date by which all schools, transport hubs and public service providers should offer 1 gigabit internet services, and said Melita was ahead of the pack.
"We’re best placed to put the digital economy as one of the strong pillars of Malta's economic growth," said Digital Economy parliamentary secretary Silvio Schembri.
Gigabit internet speeds might sound like overkill to people chugging along at their current connection speeds, but bandwidth requirements are expected to rise exponentially as more and more devices go online in the years to come.
The rise of internet of things, as it is called, will see anything from our cars to our fridges hook up to the internet. And as more devices hop onto the web, internet bandwidth requirements will rise in step.
For business owners, high-speed internet will dramatically increase the amount of information that can be carried from one point to another in a given period of time, speeding up anything from e-commerce to cloud computing.
In its statement announcing GigaPower internet, Melita said residential customers with 100Mbps internet living in Valletta, St Julian's or Sliema could access the service for an extra €25 a month.
When asked for details, a Melita spokesperson said that the service would cost residential users around €58 a month, with prices rising to €200 or more for business customers, depending on their existing package.