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A GEANT Leap Forward In Networking For Research
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."
I'm not trying to be a poseur, but really it doesn't. Let me put it into perspective another way: Right now with my measly cable modem I can download from many sites at 2Mbps+ (I get a sustained 220KB/s from Microsoft). That means that a mere 77 of me can saturate a T3, and 5,000 of me can saturate a 10Gbps. Now everyone doesn't download at the same time, but when you're talking about Europe with 100s of millions of people... BTW: I realize that this is a research network not for public consumption, but my point is moreso that it's apparently such a big deal that these 10Gbps connections exist. This naturally makes me wonder what sort of backbones exist on the North America network, because I never have a problem downloading at 220KB/second, so I presume it must be pretty extraordinary.
the internet is still U.S.-centric. Perhaps what you yanks don't realise is is that most well developed countries actually have decent internal networks, but since the lion's share of Internet content is hosted in America, this is irrelevant, since it is the pipe to the U.S. that matters.
The diagram shows this - the two U.S. pipes are at around 30-50% utilisation (and are the smallest of the network), while the giant internal linkups are around 1-2%. What this says to me is that research typically doesn't use the bandwidth that they've provided for with this project. Consumer use of the internet will still get most content from America.
But I guess there is always merit in planning for the future, and we can always benefit from making the internet less 'any-one-particular-country'-centric (despite it's origins in ARPA etc).
- They're not even using 1% of capacity
- They should invest more in the last mile
I think that their idea might be to restructure the backbone services so that they are able to handle the imminent speed and reliability increases in the last mile.In future news we'll be seeing things like:
x Telecomms corporation runs fibre in the last mile giving millions of European households the faster internet access that was made possible with the introduction of Géant's new backbone network.
I may be wrong, but that's just my $0.02
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With all the comments about using it for faster downloads, etc, etc, people seem to be missing the fact that it'll only really speed your downloads up if you're accessing another site on GEANT. Personally when I was a student, connecting to other academic sites was never particularly slow - but JANET (the UK academic net) doesn't have particularly good peering to transatlantic links (clearly due to the cost).
What GEANT will help make more possible is inter-site co-operation, and apps like high bandwidth video streams. In response to the guy who said it was a waste of money - give it time?
Seriously though, this has ( as the US based Education networks and the like do ) the capability to further increase benefits for all of the students and researchers at the connected institutions. One of the things that Internet2 doesn't have in quite as much abundance is overwhelming raw bandwidth availability. Can't find the time to visit another school to attend a lecture? A course you want to take isn't offered at your school, but is at another one?
Realtime video and remote tele-presence applications will easily consume this bandwidth and more ( assuming they aren't drowned out by DIVX and MP3s flying around. ).
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Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
In the states? Not quite so easy... due to the simple fact of the size. Same reason we don't have GSM, same reason all these nifty technologies (anything wireless) take time.
Oh yes, that's right. Europe's easy because it's small. I'd forgotten that. Europe has a tiny land mass of 3,998,000 sq miles, whereas the USA has a massive land mass of 3,717,796 sq miles, according to Encarta. Oh, hang on, those figures can't be right, surely?
And being lots of different locally governed countries speaking different languages and (until very recently) using differnt currencies - that's got to make things easier, hasn't it!
The only reason that Europe is ahead of the USA in terms of DSL, GSM and advanced networks is because the USA, being a young country, speaking a single language with virtually a single culture and mindset and single government, well, everything is so much harder for the USA isn't it?
(Yes, this is more sarcasm)
> First, why only 10Gbps? Lucent have 3 Tb long-distance optic fibre, and the primary cost of
> cable is in putting it into the ground, NOT the hardware.
What makes you think they put fibers in the ground that explode when more than 10Gb/s is pushed through them? The article doesn't mention what kind of connection is used between the nodes. That 10GBps is a L2 figure, not L1 or L0.
GEANT is a logical network, not a physical one.