New Internet Speed Record

Himanshu writes "Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2's high-speed backbone. The new record announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, Va., was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland."

For Reference...

[thebrid]

Uncompressed 1080i HDTV in RGB takes up about 1.4 Gbps. Where do I sign up :D

Re:I just hope this never gets to Joe User.

[Anonymous Coward]

If that happens, imagine the DDoS power from a group of infected Windows boxes.

Why? Not like bandwidth has been holding back all these cool DDoS attacks. After all, isn't that one of the points of the first 'D'?

Re:Stupid Question

[TigerTime]

Because if everyone had a 100mbps pipe out of their house then the main networks would be slammed.

For instance at your cable company's hub, let's say they can handle a total of 100,000 mbps to the internet (yes i'm generalizing) and all the customers have 100mbps to them.

They would severely lose the number of customers they could have. As few as 1000 for full speed.

Or they could charge companies a premium rate for 100mbs internet access and the average Joe user a regular fee for 3mbps (which is sufficient). They would be able to increase their customer base immensely while still providing a useful product.

It comes down to a tree analogy. Either a tree trunk can have a few large branches or it can have a whole lot of small branches. It CAN'T can't have a whole lot of large branches or the tree will break.

LoC/s

[tweakt]

Ok, I'll bite (I was bored).

According to the site, the LoC [loc.gov] contains:

• 29 million books
• 2.7 million recordings
• 12 million photographs
• 4.8 million maps
• 57 million manuscripts

These are quick & dirty, back-of-the-napkin estimates:
Book/Manuscripts: (300 pp. x 500 words/page x 8 bytes/word) = ~2MB
Recording: (300 sec x 176,400 bytes/sec) = ~60MB
Photograph: 500KB (2k x 2k, jpeg q=0.8 ??)
Maps: Uhh? Vector? Raster? Hmm, lets say ~10MB?

So... throwing all those numbers together, I come out with roughly...

Oh, let's call it 250 Terabytes. (or 2 Petabits).

At only 6.25 Gb/s that works out to 320,000s, or...

only 3.7 days/LoC

Clearly, more improvement is needed... (and maybe bzip2 would help?)

Re:Jack Valenti

[PatJensen]

It is a public network to campuses and research institutions. Most college campuses local area networks provide traffic routing over both networks - and Internet2 is already being used by the campuses for multicast voice and video, conferencing, large high-bandwidth FTP transfers and peer to peer applications. Here in California a lot of the campuses have a minimum of a SONET OC3c to i2, or are getting upstream i2 access through their Internet Service Provider.

Here is what the campuses pay to get connected [cenic.org]. Here is the in-depth network design for CENIC including which campuses are connected [cenic.org]. Here is the commercial version of SONET which brings that type of bandwidth to companies. [sbc.com]

-Pat

Internet 2

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Here's your answer:

Internet 2 [internet2.edu]

If you are wondering, "hrm, am *i* on intarwebs 2?"...most likely, no, but they have a tool to check for you, just nab it and try.

We use it heavily on campus and are quite active in the Access Grid [accessgrid.org]. Great stuff.

Re: Pr0n (DVDs / sec)

[tweakt]

Ahh, right. That's a better idea. Let's see how long a DVD (single layer -- 4.7GB takes):

At 6.25Gb/s, about 6 seconds. I can hear MPAA quaking in their boots. Or, if you prefer, you could stream about 600 DVDs simultaneously. *drool*

Yes... it's a SLOW day at work today. Blah...

They used a Windows Server

[esac17]

This is also the first time a Windows Server has won in the Internet2 competition:
http://lsr.internet2.edu/history.htm l