Internet Speed Record Broken (Again)

captain igor writes "CNN is reporting that researchers at Caltech and CERN successfully send 1.1 Terabytes of data at a rate of 5.44 Gbps. This is around 20,000 times faster than your typical home broadband connection and almost doubles the previous record. "

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CalTech FAST TCP project

[tessaiga]

Steven Low of CalTech's Netlab gave a talk at MIT yesterday regarding the modified TCP protocol they used to achieve this transfer. Those who are curious about the details can check out the Fast TCP homepage.

Basically they showed that conventional TCP is not very good at scaling to large flows like the ones in the article. He described a typical broadband Internet connection as being able to utilize only about 27 percent of the available bandwidth, while their modified FAST TCP connection reached 95 percent efficiency. He had some nice test results showing how the protocols reacted to having to share bandwidth with other flows, and pointed out how when other flows finished and more bandwidth opened up, conventional TCP was very slow to take advantage of the increased bandwidth.

There's an older Economist article describing the protocol in more detail for those who are interested.