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.
mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools* (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
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, 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.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:3, Interesting)
But not every PC in the world comes with Windows installed. There was a /. topic a day or two ago about computers in China which don't have Windows installed - legal or illegal. I have bought computers that had no software installed. It could happen in Sweden, but I don't know for sure. Just because you cannot buy one easily doesn't mean that the rest of the world suffers from the same constraints.
You are spot on regarding capability (1,500 HDTV channels) versus availability (more data than she can ever assimilate but only the same data to which we all have access).
Don't mock the possibility of fibre (European spelling for the Nazis that might be out there...) to every home. Much of Europe (and perhaps other regions also) has managed to avoid the problems that seem to plague internet connections in the USA. Whether its copper or fibre (although copper is far more common) it is unbundled and the user can opt for the best provider rather than being locked into whoever installed it.
A use no one has thought of yet... (Score:2, Interesting)
There are actually some uses of this connection that none of you are considering. Everyone sees the obvious "Watch TV, download movies," BUT does anyone here notice the potential for application developers? Currently a lot of us developers have moved to using the Internet for our applications, because it solves a lot of our deployment problems. However, the downside of Internet applications is that their performance is far inferior to that of desktop applications (both graphically and otherwise). We are currently hamstrung by our inability to quickly send information to a users PC. We end up using almost all our bandwidth to send down data, with a small amount to prettify the page a little, but this sort of bandwidth could allow us to run beautiful, full featured applications remotely, thus avoiding the distribution problems of standalone apps AND avoiding the current throttling problems Internet apps have currently.
Look at it this way... connection speeds like that would be for all intents and purposes just as fast as a hard drive is today, and you could treat them as such. Currently, when a computer runs an app, it pulls data/program off slow hard drive, puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. In the future, computer pulls data/program off network (at speeds as good as a hard drive), puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. The possibilities are amazing!
Re:While it's neat as a tech demo (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why there is a need for protocols which try to connect to the closest peer on the network. Yeah, there are plenty of situations where you need something from a specific location or an item specific to you, but there are plenty of situations where many people will have a copy of what you want. The current client/server model of doing most things also causes these hangups. Having to go from your computer to a server to your next door neighbor can be very inefficient.
Perhaps network software needs to be rethought.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
Get rid of all of these hard drives.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Silicon Snake Oil (Score:3, Interesting)
So guess what, now next time I am thinking about WAN infrastructure and faced with connecting 10 locations of a printing company (which move HUGE files) I have a chance of solving the problem without 150K of equipment and services per year (which are not fast enough yet).
Imagine business parks get a "WAN LINK" building where this fiber drops to other similar buildings. You just pay for a bit of routing and the line to your office and you have a more workable solution than 40 OC3 connections.
This is a HUGE deal if you do any sort of that kind of work. Screw getting on the internet, this is about making my LAN span across 5 states transparently to the user and the admins.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:1, Interesting)
Gov propaganda
http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#whatishigh
and
http://www.itvdictionary.com/hdtv.html [itvdictionary.com]
to provide a few
Re:Dumbest Question Ever (Score:2, Interesting)
I had friends that didn't keep any music they downloaded. If they wanted to listen to something, they would queue it up, hit play, and when they were done with it, delete the file. Napster downloaded things in-order, so you could start listening before it had finished.
Exactly. If I were the MAFIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be CEO of Planet Earth in 5 years.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:3, Interesting)
You may think it's a stupid idea, but they have specially made aerial fiber cable. It has been designed and tested to last many many many years in this application. They can string 100 miles of fiber aerially for the cost of trenching 1. The cost of fixing it when it breaks is factored in. It's still a much cheaper and faster way of getting fiber service to the last mile anywhere.
Re:History Repeating (Score:3, Interesting)
Two examples to draw your point more fully.
My wife's a real-estate agent. In years gone by, when you moved to a new town you wouldn't know where to look for houses. And if you were selling, getting the word out that yours was on the market was a lot of work. Real-estate agents had a lot of work to do. Now, a picture and a description gets dumped in the MLS. Now it's on the market. If you're buying, you look in the MLS. Easy communication has destroyed much of her value proposition as an agent, and is gutting the whole industry.
RIAA is in the same position my wife is in. Their value was in collecting artist and freeing them from having to market themselves. There was real work to do in getting the good artist presented to the public. Now they get in the way (and they damn well know it).
Many other industries are experiencing the same sort of "what'd'we do now" moments.
Pity that we can't have this here in the US. (Score:1, Interesting)
I can't tell what is holding us up in speed of our connections; corporate management which worries about ROI or government which worries about giving the people too much access to the world but we, in US, need to get our collective rears together and get our network and broadband speeds up to the rest of the world.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. If everyone had that kind of bandwidth you could just keep all of your data on the network at all times. Many a clever programmer can attest to using a network for temporary storage. With effectively infinite bandwidth, it no longer needs to be temporary.