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.
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.
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No, but her new TV program [youtube.com] might
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
So that PB could what? Serve kilobyte torrent index files in a few microseconds?
--Rob
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Exactly. If I were the MAFIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be CEO of Planet Earth in 5 years.
What All Other ./ers Would Do... (Score:5, Funny)
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In other news, a 75 year old woman was killed earlier today when the disk platters from her computer's hard drive flew out of the case, proceeding through her, and her little dog too. Many analysts expect the grieving family to sue Google, the owners of the interwebernet, for
Re:Great publicity stunt (Score:5, Funny)
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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?
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Of course it's hard to install Windows on such a specialised beast! (A *nix would have been the logic choice.)
Without more information, I highly, highly doubt that her computer itself is equipped to handle 40Gbps of sustained traffic throughput...
Even IF Windows needed to be installed on a machine, it's false to say that was the "hardest part" of enabling an experimental 40Gbps connection to a residence.
And why are you claim
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.
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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 b
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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.
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"Bah, I'm off to see the Intarhwebs on the wireless, call me when the soup's ready."
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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 ev
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For more information, this is how things
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Nice try, but this time the point you're trying to make is flat out wrong thanks to the internet providers pushing their own VoIP and TV services over their pipes. The content would come directly from the service provider and enjoy every last bit of bandwidth the user has between the service provider and the user.
and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again?
Who knows? Maybe because
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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: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?
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interesting that they ran it 2000 Kilometers to a home. I doubt they laid new cable just for this test. So, what did they add? What hardware did the women need to have put into the ground?
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If they installed Windows, they installed fucking Windows, OK? The point is that the fibre wasn't hard to configure.
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I understand they point they were trying to make: that using such a high speed connection, when commoditized someday, isn't "hard" or "complicated". A good point to want to make, considering it was a PR stunt.
The truth of the matter is that since this is an experimental connection using experimental equipment, it was probably set up by Cisco network engineers, was in fact extremely expensive and "hard" to set up, and required fibre routing through specialized facilities and equipment.
Sure, the p
Yes, but the real qustion (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably, but... (Score:2)
-Rick
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 imped
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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 dropp
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Forget that. The REAL question is... (Score:2)
And at the risk of dragging it back into technology, that's assuming they give her a lot of TFTs too. Otherwise on a 1920x1200 pixel screen, we're talking 1536 pixels per movie window. Assuming they're tiled without borders, that's... hmm... closest I can get while keeping the 16/9 aspect ratio is 48 by 27 pixels per movie. Not gonna see much detail there, and that's putting it mildly
Here it comes... (Score:5, Funny)
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But seriously. Can you imagine seeding on this link while all your peers are on similar bandwidth? How long would it take to download the full run of any popular series (5 to 10 seasons)?
Somebody stop me... Please... I can't help it.
How much is that in Libraries of Congress per blink of a human eye?
There. I can breath again.
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mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools* (Score:2, Interesting)
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One connection to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.
Huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huh. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh. (Score:4, Funny)
maybe thats why it was so hard to install windows. (Score:2)
perhaps she was running one of these ?
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/xe/ [sgi.com]
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 lo
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.
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Of course, with that much bandwidth, why bother with local storage at all? She can just stream anything she needs, and all the real storage will be at her son's place.
what are the uses for this speed of connection? (Score:2)
- watching movies
- downloading movies
One or more content middle men industries (ie TV, DVDs) is looking at the brink of an economic revolution. There can't be any denying it now.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 cur
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You must be stuck in the WebTV version of the internet.
How about an interactive 3D environment with no slowdowns / weird behaviour due to latency and bandwidth limitiations? How about home users being able to be true peers on the internet (the way the network was designed to run) instead of not being allowed to run servers or worse being restricted to only the web and email--isps claiming servers and other apps use too much bandwidth. They wouldn't have this argument anymore.
In fact email was originally
asking on behalf of Seth Rogan... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan... (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone call the RIAA (Score:2)
Ultra-high-speed connection, even if it has no bearing on its use? Check.
Foreign and not even subject to US legislature? Check.
If the RIAA want to outdo themselves in the "Really fucking bad lawsuit target" department they have the perfect target now...
Source feed (Score:2)
I'd like to see this tech come into place for CAN's (City Area Networks).
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.
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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
Errr, ok but..... (Score:3, Insightful)
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One of the use of this is (Score:2)
I have just three words.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Phone Number (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe I can just live in her basement, a change of scenery would do me good. Besides Mom is always nagging at me to get out of the basement and go see the world.
Re:Phone Number (Score:5, Insightful)
meanwhile in Indiana (Score:3, Insightful)
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(ducks)
Re:meanwhile in Indiana (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Do the math... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called OC-192 (Score:2)
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.
download to dev/null (Score:3, Insightful)
the real story (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Your mom is on the line again, Peter... (Score:3, Funny)
...she says the Microsoft Internet is down again even with that forty jiggle-bite thingy you installed.
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And no PCI-Express isn't just for graphic cards.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)