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New Internet2 Land Speed Record

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the infinite-bandwidth-now dept.

SquadBoy writes "An international team set a new record for Internet performance by transferring the equivalent of an entire compact disc's contents across more than 7608 miles (12,272 km) of network in 13 seconds. The rate of 401 megabits per second achieved in transferring 625 megabytes of data from Fairbanks, Alaska to Amsterdam in the Netherlands is over 8000 times greater than the fastest dial-up modem."

5 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. that's fast by Kargan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I'm not mistaken, that's approximately as fast as a 7200rpm ATA/66 drive can transfer data, say, to another partition on the same drive, or what have you.

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    Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
  2. It will never help me. by fmaxwell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some day, I'll have that kind of bandwidth running to my home. And my ISP will still disallow my personal telnet server because of the strain it will put on the network.

  3. Compression and such.. by wbav · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This article, I feel is more than a little vauge. What did they use to transfer? Was it just over electrical/telephone lines, or did they use optics? What kind of compression was used, and what kind of signal boosters/optical repeaters were used in sending this. All of these items could be used to affect the speed of transfer, and well, the article just doesn't say. I mean in theory, one could build a router from parallel to serial that could take data at 9.6 terabits/sec. How are they actually measuring things? Just the time between there and here? Using full optical lines, wouldn't they be able to set the record at c * the index of refraction of the fiberoptic line? It would just be a matter of putting all the data into one block of light.

    Also the article suggested only one way communication, what happens with error checking and such?

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    =================
    Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
    1. Re:Compression and such.. by mindstrm · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You are speaking theoretically.

      Yes, you could send data much faster than this over fiber. We do it in labs all the time. HEck, we do it in networks over copper all the time (GigE..)

      This is an actual working network, and they send the data from Alaska to The Netherlands at 400mbps. That is fantastic.

  4. All joking aside.. by SideshowBob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    pr0n jokes aside :-)

    They really shouldn't be building up expectations in people's minds that "Internet2" is going to make things faster for them.

    These types of stories eventually wind up in the Tech section of the local newspapers etc. and its A Bad Thing TM to build up mis-perceptions.

    Internet2 is not going to solve last mile bandwidth limitations.