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World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:52 PM
from the no-one-needs-that-much-pr0n dept.
from the no-one-needs-that-much-pr0n dept.
paulraps writes "A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" An article in Press Esc notes an analyst study of the increasing demand for fiber-to-the-home in Europe.
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Idle: World's Fastest Net Link 'Used To Dry Laundry' 114 comments
praps writes "Last summer a 75-year-old woman from central Sweden became the envy of the IT world with her scorching 40Gbps internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels or a whole high definition DVD downloaded in two seconds were hers for the taking. Now Sigbritt Löthberg could soon be treated to an incredible 100 Gbps link — but it may not be put to great use. According to the head of the ultra-fast fiber connection project, Sigbritt mostly used the gear 'to dry her laundry.'"
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Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?
That's what I thought.
She is able to "enjoy" nothing on her connection except the same internet to which we all have access. Sure, you can argue that as such bandwidth penetration becomes commonplace, services will be built to support it - like HD movie downloads or live HD IPTV. But as of now, this is nothing more than a technology demonstration, even though the article lamely begs to differ ("This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.")
"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.
Doubtful. (Why even say this? To impress upon people that a high bandwidth connection isn't "hard" to use? Wouldn't the new computer she ostensibly got, since, as the article notes, she's never owned a computer in her life, have come with Windows installed?[1])
The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.
Great, now all we need is fibre going to every home on earth, and the problem is solved!! Why look at wireless when we've got fibre?
...
I understand the point they're trying to make: that a high speed connection that enables the kinds of things such bandwidth allows is technically feasible to a home. But the problem is the same one we've always had - namely, the "last mile" [wikipedia.org] - and this does nothing to solve that in the least.
"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.
Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX [wikipedia.org] and UMTS Rev 8 [wikipedia.org] are at least an option worth considering as a solution to the "last mile" problem?
Overall, a great PR stunt.
4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])
[1] For the real contrarians among us, yes, I'm well aware that systems can be built and purchased without Windows. But if the goal was to get a computer that will ultimately be running Windows, and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again? Exactly.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?
PirateBay, of course. One of Sweden's national treasures.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Funny)
At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds she is the PirateBay. Now that's who he should have given the connection to. I doubt her secret lutefisk recipe is going to need quite that much bandwidth.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
My (aging) PATA based system can't even handle 2MB off the internet, which I can get from a couple websites that just so happen to be hosted at the same site my employeer peers at. 40Gb? Disk platters would fly out of the case.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
My laptop can write at between 10MB/s and 30MB/s, depending on where on the disk you are writing. 30MB/s is 240Mb/s. If you built a RAID array out of laptop disks, you would need 170 of them at best, 510 at worst to be able to store the data.
On the other hand, when your network is faster than your disk, the only things worth storing locally are things that need fast random access to (latency is still going to be bigger over the network than the disk).
The point of a 40Gb connection is not what you can do with it, it's what you can't, and the thing you can't do is saturate it (easily). Until disks and CPUs are a few orders of magnitude faster than they are now, 40Gb/s is effectively infinite bandwidth, and that's what makes it interesting. What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
Get rid of all of these hard drives.
What All Other ./ers Would Do... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
Because there simply isn't enough bandwidth in the air itself for fast wireless. When 3G came out, an engineer I drink beer with often gave me the full SP on why video telephony would never take off. Basically, because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.
This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.
This also goes some way to explaining why HDTV is a bit of a con, especially if you're using a dish rather than cable. Firstly, if you broadcast HDTV at the same bandwidth as normal TV, even with mpeg-4, it looks worse, because the artifacts are more visible. So you could use more bandwidth for a nicer looking channel? Yep.. at cost..
For an important show, eg. a world cup soccer match, the content provider can pay the broadcaster for extra bandwidth for the 90 minute duration of the match, and it looks great. Unfortunately, if the match goes into extra time, the bandwidth lease drops, and the remaining 30 minutes of footy look like crap! I'm not joking, this actually happens.
Sure, we can reduce the wavelength and improve the compression, and it will improve over time, but the laws of physics in the realm of wireless are somewhat more restrictive than those of physical wiring, and we're a long way off getting anywhere near the quality that we're being hyped.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
There are already cameras on every corner, I'm sure they can handle antennas as well...
This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.
That's what the Internet is all about. IP is packet based and multiplexed. Do you think you have your own dedicated connection to slashdot servers? Also: yes, GPRS is packet based, but not necessarily charged per packet. Many people pay a flat rate for GPRS, just like Internet access.
This is the same argument people use to claim DSL is better than cable. Well, I can't get more than 3mbps DSL with their "dedicated line". I just switched to cable for the same price and get bursts of 20Mbps, with 6+Mbps continuous.
Basically, this really fact-free article is claiming that fiber is "cost effective" but doesn't say the slightest about the cost. I guarantee it costs thousands of dollars to install per home, and that's just the last mile, not the massive changes and upgrades that would be required to support this bandwidth that has no useful application to the home for 99.9% of the public. Download an HD-DVD in 2 seconds? To WHERE? Try copying a 30GB file between 2 PCs with GiGE on the same LAN (or even 2 HDDs on the same computer). If it takes 2 seconds, I will pay for your FTTH installation.
Just as the OP said, this is purely a Cisco-sponsored publicity stunt.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
[1] For the real contrarians among us, yes, I'm well aware that systems can be built and purchased without Windows. But if the goal was to get a computer that will ultimately be running Windows, and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again? Exactly.
And no, since I'm sitting on a gigabit network on a 10Gbps backbone connected to Internet2/Abilene and BOREASNet, I don't have "network envy". This is a publicity stunt, plain and simple.
Even 10Gbps PCIe NICs for computers only push about 6-7Gbps...to claim that a 40Gbps connection to an old lady's house is anything BUT a publicity stunt is laughable. Doesn't quite have the same ring as doing the same test between laboratory or corporate facilities, does it?
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're laying copper, you're running it to the CO. When you're laying fibre, you're running it to building/premises/neighbourhood access layer switches. The latter is a cheaper solution than building a fully-fledged CO. It's no significant hurdle compared to copper. Both need digging, and that's pretty much all there is to it. The ISP I work for does fibre to the home, and we have one of the best per-customer profit margins of all European ISPs. Last mile fibre to the home is -not- an insurmountable task.
In rural areas, copper is cheaper, but in rural areas, many people still only have 56k dial-up, too, and at that kind of bandwidth and latency, satellite connections are a much better choice anyway.
Yes, but the real qustion (Score:5, Insightful)
Here it comes... (Score:5, Funny)
Huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Funny)
History Repeating (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just Shirley Bassey who thinks history is repeating, I do too. When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
This lead to a collapse in price of a whole range of minerals and materials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humble cannal was the back-bone of the Industrial Revolution. It supplied cheap materials, power in the form of water wheels, and allowed production of a product to move far away from sea, yet still have global reach at the same time.
Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities. It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second.
Forget Web 2.0, AJAX or Silverlight. In a century these words will only be known by Internet Historians, who will still have no better clue that us what web 2.0 actually means ;). What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.
Simon
Sign me up! (Score:5, Funny)
40 Gbps? Wow, sign me up for this!
Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.
Gee, I would think the hardest part would be: (Score:5, Funny)
Of course if she's anything like my 71 year-old Mom it would mean she could fall asleep in from of 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously.
the real story (Score:5, Funny)
Every story needs photos (Score:5, Informative)
There's some photos [stupi.se] on Peter Lothberg's site that might be his mom playing with her new connection.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Phone Number (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan... (Score:5, Insightful)