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.
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.
Yes, but the real qustion (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Quite unlikely (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming she has a massive drive array to record that amount of info in two seconds. I know the statement is just to illustrate the bandwidth but the nerd in me had to point out the infeasibility of it. Preposterous!
I'll go now.
Re:mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools* (Score:3, Insightful)
One connection to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.
Errr, ok but..... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have just three words.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
Of course it's hard to install Windows on such a specialised beast! (A *nix would have been the logic choice.)
And why are you claiming this does not cure the Last Mile problem when this is story is all about fibre straight in the home?
meanwhile in Indiana (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion (Score:3, Insightful)
True story: a guy says, "I got a 100MB connection into my office but it's slow." Go to his office test his desktop. Yup slow. (1.5mb or so) Eventually test all the way back to the adapter. Holy smoke! 100MB at the adapter.
Two problems:
1. Turns out he bought the "top of the line" Netgear switch at Best Buy.
2. Win32 NIC is configured to auto, which apparently chose the slowest possible speed.
Today's Lesson: Windows and vanilla hardware are their own impediments to fast networks.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the math... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:History Repeating (Score:4, Insightful)
Gears. If you have a large mass of water moving, it doesn't need to be moving fast.
Silicon Snake Oil (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
*Long, typical blogger-eze pie-in-the-sky rant snipped*
I don't see any validity in your comparison; the article is about last-mile connectivity, and you're talking about..end-to-end delivery paths. The internet is nothing like a dedicated canal; it's a public road system.
As such, the better comparison would be as if said grandmother got a 3-lane driveway from her garage to the local street, and she's got a bicycle in the garage and bad knees. The slowest bottlenecks are the rest of the internet and her home computer; PCI busses can't push data any faster than about 200-300MB/sec, which is what, 2-3GB? Most datacenters offer 10mbit-all-you-can-eat or 100mbit billed-by-the-bit. Sure, there's faster- but it's megabucks, the stuff only major corporations can afford.
This Silicon Snake Oil. Read Cliff Stoll's book by the same title.
Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
download to dev/null (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Phone Number (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Silicon Snake Oil (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason you think huge bandwidth to the home is unfeasible is because you're stuck in the capitalist mentality, the very monster that spawned the MAFIAA and the current US political environment. Plentiful, cheap anything is bad for business, so business steps in and makes sure that cheap thing never materializes. Bandwidth is no exception to this rule.
The telecoms have already laid thousands of miles of wires to handle phone and cable TV to every urban household. I don't see why they couldn't do it again for fiber. The reason they don't want to is because having a hyperfast digital line would make the old stuff obsolete. Why pay a separate bill for phone and cable when you can run the same data over the lone fiber line ? The telecoms are already fighting consumers over VOIP and IPTV-style streams, because they represent a direct threat to their bottom line.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, and to further strengthen your argument, current storage technology has a theoretical throughput of 3.0 Gbps per disk. Assuming you could acheive 40 Gbps to a functional PC, you'd need a 14 drive non-redundant array to even theoretically have the numbers to download to disk, of course, that would require an equal number of pci-e lanes to get to a hypothetical controller that could handle the throughput. If trying to use a ram-backed storage strategy, you'd use up all memory of, say, 8GB in less than two seconds. Unless 4 GB of data can be discarded per second, that won't work either.
So, absolutely for any realistic home use, the throughput in the article is useless, since no media has currently ludicrous requirements where 4 GB of data per second can be consumed and discarded per second, and storage becomes the bottleneck for downloading. There exist applications that can benefit from transferring that much data over a network, crunching on it and being done with 4 GB datasets in a second, but they are few and far between and none really applicable for a home computer.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
So that PB could what? Serve kilobyte torrent index files in a few microseconds?
--Rob
Re:Dumbest Question Ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the POINT of this article is that it may not be for long. Keep in mind that fiber prices are coming down and the price of copper is going up. Existing fiber and copper have relatively short length limits before repeaters too. With current tech, they have to have remote terminals / DLC's etc. all over the place to extend the reach of the CO. This new fiber tech can go 2000km without a repeater. That's huge! That shitcans all the "in the middle" equipment so it could be just the CO and the premise (house, business.) Now in reality, they will keep a bunch of that remote equipment so they can reduce the number of fiber lines from the CO and tree out, but the old existing limits of unrepeated fiber and copper are effectively a non-issue with the new tech.
So yeah, right now, today, copper is cheaper, but copper can't do what fiber can do so it's a moot point anyway. If you want 1/10th the speed of fiber, it's still going to cost you 10 times more to do it in copper right now (talking last mile here...) If that cheap.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Insightful)