World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps 416
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.
While it's neat as a tech demo (Score:4, Informative)
I mean in a very real way, my computer has a gigabit Internet connection. That's what it is linked at, and there's other devices it can talk to at that speed... But only very few. If it wants anything past its immediate network, it is limited to 10mbits, since that's the speed of the Internet connection. Now while my net connection really has the upstream to support that, imagine if it didn't. Suppose that the provider only had 1mbit of upstream, and it was shared among a bunch of users. Essentially my "10mbit broadband" would be useless unless I happened to be talking to someone else on their system.
In fact I've encountered broadband that is like this. I'll be transferring data to someone that claims to have 10mbit VDSL. I've no doubt they do, but their ISP lacks the bandwidth to back it up. So despite the fact that I'm at work sitting on multiple OC-3c lines and I've verified they aren't slammed, and they allegedly have a "10mbit" connection, we are getting rates more around ISDN because their ISP's upstream is slammed.
That's the "elephant in the closet" so to speak, of Internet access. I see plenty of people who tout fibre to the home and all these great technologies for lots of bandwidth on the last mile run. That's great and all, but really that's half or less of the problem. It doesn't do you any good to get a fast line to your house if there aren't even faster lines at every stage of upstream. That is not cheap, unfortunately. If you wanted to offer 40gbps to the home, I'd imagine you'd need trunks in the multi-terabit capacity going from your concentration point back to the home office and god only knows what as an actual Internet connection, at least if you wanted people to reliably be able to get a good portion of that 40gbps.
Actually, it's called (Score:4, Informative)
They were testing a new modulation techniques that make it cheaper. SO you won't need money to burn to get it.
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:Do the math... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:3, Informative)
But in the meantime, "this is nothing more than a technology demonstration."
Try reading my post next time. I understand the points they're making, but that doesn't change the fact this is an experimental demonstration and a publicity stunt for Cisco.
Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion (Score:3, Informative)
I returned a consumer-grade Netgear gigabit switch and replaced it with a D-Link switch a few weeks ago because the Netgear switch was showing about 85% packet loss at 100 mbps speeds. Sadly, in my experience, Netgear just doesn't build them like they used to. Oh, and then there was the Netgear ethernet card that wouldn't start talking to the network if you disconnected and reconnected the cable. You had to shut the interface down and bring it back up. After a couple of years like that, it started dropping off the network on its own, and I tossed it and bought a D-Link card.
Considering what a small amount of networking gear I own, after getting burned twice by Netgear's crap, I've pretty much sworn off their products. They're now in my "don't buy" list alongside Linksys (whose switches wouldn't consistently talk to other switches upstream at my previous employer). I'd better stop swearing off networking product manufacturers pretty soon or I'm going to run out. :-)
Don't get me wrong.... D-Link is no picnic, either, but at least their hardware is solid. Had to rewrite the property list file to get their Mac OS X driver to load in 10.4, though. It shipped with an old disk and there wasn't a newer version of the software on their website as far as I could find. I wrote them and asked them to fix it. Not sure if they ever did... *sigh* ...but at least their hardware is solid. *grumbles*
Re:meanwhile in Indiana (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:2, Informative)