A GEANT Leap Forward In Networking For Research

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday December 10, 2001 @04:09AM from the forget-the-plunger-build-new-pipes dept.

An anonymous reader contributes: "A research backbone network interconnecting more than 30 countries, through which hundreds of universities can exchange traffic, with a backbone running at 10 Gbps, born on the 1st of December. Yes, it exists, and this research network is not even in the U.S.! GEANT is a european initiative which has just come online, so if you're a student in Europe, you may have noticed a significant change in your downloads speeds since last week. You can even check its weathermap! Well, obviously backbone links are still unused ... but that shouldn't last long, once people notice the sheer amount of bandwidth."

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And as you can see, it's not using even... by Ieshan · 2001-12-10 04:15 · Score: 1, Flamebait

a single percent of it's total capacity right now.

What does that mean? It's not even using up, in almost all cases, any more than a 1Gbps line would be using. Take a look at all that blue on the map. It seems to signify that this was a waste of time and money.

Basically, I'm all for this great stuff, but until they find a use for it, it's just money wasted when it could be going to places and projects in technology that could actually benefit.