Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec

TheShrike writes: "As reported in the Denver Rocky Mountain News: 'Almost without fanfare, a joint venture of Denver-based Qwest Communications and Dutch telecommunications company KPN has smashed the cyber speed record for transmission of data over the Internet. The joint venture, called KPNQwest, transmitted 40 gigabits of data per second in a 100-mile round-trip connection between Frankfurt and Gernsheim, Germany, last week.'" Add Napster, stir. [16th May, 4:50GMT: Updated headline to read "Gb" not "GB." Thanks, all. -t.]

Comments

Re:Mmmm...bandwidth *drool*

[Jeffrey Baker]

Well, this is missing the point of MBone and multicast technology. To send a 1 Mbps video signal down the MBone to 100000 people requires exactly 1 Mbps of bandwidth on any single link. Routers that are routing the signal to multiple destinations need some multiple of that for their backplane speed, but not on the wire. Sadly, the current popular streaming formats (RealVideo, in particular) would require 100 Gbps to do the same thing. Sigh.

Yeah that's great but..

[HalB]

I'd like to see them get the latency down. What good is extra bandwidth if it doesn't improve your gaming experience? 8')

Mmmm...bandwidth *drool*

[AntiNorm]

Several issues/questions are raised by having gargantuan amounts of bandwidth as in this story:

1. Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.

2. MB overload. Even the most modern computer systems can only handle so much bandwidth...

3. Overki...never mind, there's no such thing as overkill when it comes to having too much bandwidth.

And last but not least....
4. $$$$$. Bandwidth is a Good Thing(tm), but it can get rather expensive.


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Dumb question?

[drix]

Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second? That's well above the throughput of any bus system I'm aware of, let alone RAM or hard drive. Any idea how they do this?

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