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World's Fastest Internet Transfer Rate?

vrioux asks: "While browsing through available Internet service offerings in my area, I became puzzled by the large amount of different speed records that seem to have been achieved in the past months. Some say that 5.44Gbits was the fastest ever achieved, while others seem to think 923Mbits is still in the race. Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"

61 comments

  1. Obvious answer... by i.r.id10t · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... a 747/station wagon/fed ex truck or similar full of $mediaofchoice

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
    1. Re:Obvious answer... by pvt_medic · · Score: 1

      I forgot where i read it but some guy uses messenger pigeons to fly digital pictures of people out doing some outdoorsy type stuff and can send like couple of gigs in like 30 minutes with the birds to the pictures are ready when they get back to base camp

      --
      30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
      Score:5, Troll
    2. Re:Obvious answer... by GiMP · · Score: 1

      You read it on slashdot less than a whole month ago. On December 13th, "Pigeons Faster than Internet"

    3. Re:Obvious answer... by TheTimoo · · Score: 1

      This one always comes up and it makes me wonder if anybody measured how long it would take to read that "747/station wagon/fed ex truck" loaded with "$mediaofchoice" back in the system they're carrying it to. Would it still be faster than? How long does it take to read that many CDs anyway? Or do by "$mediaofchoice" they mean one really large harddrive?

      I mean, come on! These are the kinds of questions we want answered!

      --
      "Be careful or be roadkill" - Calvin
    4. Re:Obvious answer... by FauxReal · · Score: 1

      ... a 747/station wagon/fed ex truck or similar full of $mediaofchoice

      Does this measurement take into account the time taken to write to the media, then loading and unloading of media into the vehicle?

  2. What distance... by pvt_medic · · Score: 4, Informative

    are they measuring. I mean its one thing to have a really fast transfer rate from computer to computer if they are right next to each other, its another thing to go half way around the world.

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    30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
    Score:5, Troll
    1. Re:What distance... by Fizzl · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well... How about reading the articles?

  3. truck by capoccia · · Score: 2, Insightful

    last i heard, a truck full of backup tapes was still faster than the internet.

    1. Re:truck by kayen_telva · · Score: 2, Informative

      no one ever considers the task(time) of loading the data onto the computer when they quote this.
      when you use the internet, the data is already on your computer.

      wow. I need to relax ;)

    2. Re:truck by RobKow · · Score: 1

      There's nothing preventing you from moving your entire computer, data and all.

      Now that's transfer rate.

    3. Re:truck by saden1 · · Score: 0

      but doing so will require more cargo space or less data, thus leading to lower transfare rate.

      --

      -----
      One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
    4. Re:truck by Glonoinha · · Score: 1

      If only they made computers that were smaller, lighter, easier for a single person to carry. Maybe a slightly more expensive version of the computers we currently use, with a built in keyboard and a flip-up lid with a screen on it.

      Naw, that would never work.

      -G

      As for the discussion, I was looking at a way to get about 6 CDs worth of data to a friend just this week. I considered how long it would take to upload 3G at about 118K/s sustained (cablemodem is fast downstream, but throttled pretty bad upstream at 128K) ... 10 hours plus if everything went ok the first run. I ended up just burning him copies and UPS'ing them. It wasn't faster to UPS them, but it was pretty dang close.

      Replace '6 CD's' with '10 DVD's' and all of a sudden even UPS ground is faster than the upstream connection on my cablemodem .. 4.6 Days if everything went 100% smoothly with no disconnects or slowdowns during transmission.

      Change '10 DVD's' to two 160G IDE drives and it would probably be faster for me to drive them cross country myself.

      --
      Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
    5. Re:truck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      just use a couple of 200 GB hard drives, fex ex the drives, connect them to a computer at the other end, and viola ... hard drives aren't that heavy

    6. Re: truck by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1


      > last i heard, a truck full of backup tapes was still faster than the internet.

      How 'bout a wheelbarrow full of the new 1" 4GB drives?

      We could have races, to see which geek was capable of the most bandwidth!

      --
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    7. Re:truck by jamesh · · Score: 1

      okay then... a truck loaded with a generator powered pc connected to a large high density disk array.
      It's already loaded when you get there. :p

  4. pointless by Codeala · · Score: 0

    Seems pretty pointless... anyone can come up with all sort of result base on their method of measuring. eg which protocol are you using? (eg http, ftp?) where are your source and destination hosts? time and duration of your test, etc.

    --

    Codeala - Just another mindless drone
  5. Depends by topside420 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Transfer rate "records" can be a little fuzzy, because you have differant types of transmission methods and physical link layers which are designed for differant situations and each may break a record in its respective area (i.e. X GB/s transfered over 200 miles with no amplification/repeaters)

    On a side note, your standard fiber OC-192 is 10-Gbit/s. And your OC-48 is 2.45Gbit/s. While your OC-192s are definitly not common, its not unheard of for service providers with big ONS SONET networks to have them.

    1. Re:Depends by pr00f · · Score: 1

      Tier one providers maybe.

      Microsoft has the most bandwidth in Washington state. They're connected directly to every backbone you have likely heard of or care about. And since they're usually a participant in one way or another...

  6. Hrumph by NanoGator · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"

    No, but I have a compelling essay about who was the best Star Trek captain. I have some time tomorrow night if you'd like me to read it to you. /*I hope the mods are in good humor today*/

    --
    "Derp de derp."
    1. Re:Hrumph by ObviousGuy · · Score: 1

      They've been in uncharacteristically bad humor the past week or so.

      It might just be the post-holiday emotional slump.

      --
      I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
    2. Re:Hrumph by unitron · · Score: 1

      Best Star Trek captain in just the television shows/movies, or are the ones in the books eligible as well?

      --

      I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.

  7. Who knows... by gtrubetskoy · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This is an ambigous question, and the articles cited aren't very clear either. It seems that both articles transferred data over very long distances, but still, I couldn't figure out from reading them what the main constraints were.

    An OC-192 SONET circuit is (IIRC) 9.6 Gbps and are used in lots of places.

    My guess is that they were referring to serial transmittion (i.e. one bit at a time - a "truck with tapes" wouldn't qualify) specifically across the atlantic, using existing circuits. Otherwise, those numbers don't sound like much of a record.

    It's entirely possible that these records are beat on routine bases by telco's/ISP's, perhaps they just don't necessarily care to disclose it.

  8. better question by hankaholic · · Score: 2, Funny
    Is there anybody who really knows who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?
    How about, "Is there anybody who really cares who holds the Internet transfer world speed record?"

    Surprisingly, at least two people seem to care -- vrioux and Cliff. I'm surprised.

    Slow news day, eh?
    --
    Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
  9. Did the poser of the question read the dates? by dougmc · · Score: 4, Informative
    First, the 5.44 Gbps record --
    New Internet speed record set by Euro-US labs ( 2003-10-16 04:51)
    And now the 923 Mbit/s record --
    Scientists: Internet speed record smashed By Jeordan Legon CNN Friday, March 7, 2003 Posted: 1:50 PM EST (1850 GMT)
    Since the lower rate happened earlier, it would seem logical that one record was set back in March, and it was broken back in October.

    Roughly 100 years ago, the world record for powered airplane speed was probably under 60 mph ... I imagine it's somewhat faster now.

    (Of course, `Internet Speed Record' ... who really cares? I'll care when I can have this transfer rate to my house for $60/month :)

    1. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by burns210 · · Score: 1

      A better question would be when will fastTCP get rolled out mainstream? paying a couple extra bucks a month(i pay 15/mo for dialup) to get fastTCP speeds(rediculous-fast, in some cases) would be worth it. plus, it would make broadband reach the supreme level of super-duper-fast.

    2. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by amorsen · · Score: 1

      Do you think a "couple extra bucks a month" are going to pay even the interest on the investment in burying a fiber to your home?

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    3. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    4. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by DA-MAN · · Score: 1

      Other people seem to have it figured out.

      Go to http://bb.softbankbb.co.jp/ybb45m/ from babelfish (using Japanese to English).

      You're lookin at 45 mbps down, 3 mbps up for around $40 US from Yahoo!. The same Yahoo! we got here, you know the BSD zealots favorite website.

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    5. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by burns210 · · Score: 1

      " Do you think a "couple extra bucks a month" are going to pay even the interest on the investment in burying a fiber to your home?"

      Uh... no. That wasn't at all what i was asking for, though. What i want, is for ISPs to migrate to fastTCP in place of regular TCP... The fastTCP is able to do things to the protocol to(you guessed) go faster. it can be run on any media, since it is only an advanced TCP, but the speed increase is enormous, and well worth a "couple extra bucks a month"... This is a protocol upgrade, software, not a hardware upgrade like fiber.

    6. Re:Did the poser of the question read the dates? by amorsen · · Score: 1

      FastTCP is utterly useless on the kind of connections you and I have. Regular TCP easily maxes those out.

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  10. Both articles refer to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...the Internet2 Land Speed Record, which is included in the the Guinness Book of World Records. The actual marks are bandwidth x distance

  11. Only on the Internet? by rmohr02 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives.

    1. Re:Only on the Internet? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 1

      You don't need to do it over the station wagon... Myself, I get excellent bandwidth well in excess of 100Mbps from http://127.0.0.1 :)

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
    2. Re:Only on the Internet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives.
      But imagine the packet loss when it runs over a bump!
  12. Tat-14 by J2000_ca · · Score: 2, Informative

    Tat-14
    "It has a dual route, transatlantic capacity of 640 Gbits on 2 service fiber pairs backed up by 2 protection fiber pairs. This configuration provides a capability of transporting 4,096 STM-1's or approximately 9,700,000 circuits across the ocean."

    It more depends what is being counted though. Your never going to get all of this fiber at once. If you count from a local isp the speed record or from the backbone or from a rual isp it all depends.

  13. terabyte meters per second by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 1

    Sounds like an appropriate metric to me.
    Any numbers you read in any of the above articles should be multiplied by the distance between endpoints across all router links, and re-ranked. The parent post has a good example.

    --
    THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
    1. Re:terabyte meters per second by Crypto+Gnome · · Score: 1

      bah! Not really!

      The distinguishing feature here is actually latency, not distance. Distance only counts in that, generally, in most networking, all other factors being equal (or nearly so), increasing distance implies increasing latency.

      In fact, I can SIMULATE a gigabit network pipe reaching from Sydney to San Jose simply by locally connecting two computers over gigabit ethernet, and articifially inducing ~170-210ms RTT latency. (fyi: I'm in sydney, and the first SanJose/Sprintlink hop shows max 169ms)

      IN fact, there's at least one OpenSource tool (mental blank, forgot the name) which will happily transparently induce latency and random packet loss to a specified % - an excellent long-distance network simulation tool.

      The *only* reason these (and similar) articles mention the distances involved is so that the Joe SixPacks of the world can wrap their brains around the difficulties involved.

      Surely, as a reader and contributor to slashdot, you don't consider yourself to be "Just Another Joe SixPack"?

      --
      Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
    2. Re:terabyte meters per second by Glonoinha · · Score: 1

      -IN fact, there's at least one OpenSource tool (mental blank, forgot the name) which will happily transparently induce latency and random packet loss to a specified % ...

      Sounds like my ISP.

      --
      Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  14. Yeah how do you measure this? by mnmn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can put two desktop machines with good frontside busses side by side, and use etherchannel using the new 10gbit ethernet chips by Intel, and you theoretically have 20gbit. I'm pretty sure upper-end Juniper and cisco ATM switches can do it much better using loadbalancing of interfaces.

    So do two systems side by side and connected to the net qualify as 'across the Internet', or is the rule to use only standard consumer ISPs?

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    1. Re:Yeah how do you measure this? by Glonoinha · · Score: 1

      They are also considering distance.
      20Gb/s x 1 meter = 20Gigabit meters per second.
      Double the distance to two meters and you have 40Gigabit meters per second.

      --
      Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
    2. Re:Yeah how do you measure this? by Glonoinha · · Score: 1

      Whoops.

      I did the math. The Internet2 discussed above (record holder) moved 1.1 terabytes across 7,000 meters in less than 30 minutes. This translates to roughly 5.44 gigabits / second sustained across a distance of 7,000m.

      In relation to the 20gigabit meters / second you describe, these guys pumped :
      38,080,000 gigabit meters / second.
      38,080 terabit meters / second.
      38 petabit meters / second.

      That is very cool, but what the article doesn't mention is that the files they used were all MP3's and now the RIAA is after them for $647 quadrillion dollars in damages.

      --
      Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  15. Q: What are they measuring? A: (read on) by Crypto+Gnome · · Score: 2, Informative

    These mystery articles talking up "new internet speed records" are not talking about "mega-fast line capacity". Anyone can engineer a nice fat bundle of lines to up the ante - it just costs Money (specifically, LOTS OF).

    What these people are going on about is the real-world actual measured data-throughput between a single pair of computers across "the internet" (usually across a significant chunk of the world).

    Anyone who's tried to use any TCP based protocol (eg FTP, HTP) to send mind-warpingly large chunks of data understand the throughput limitations imposed on said communication as a direct result of large RTT latency.

    I'm not sure about these two instances specifically (articles give essentially ZERO technical details) but many similar researches are an attempt to derive new (bigger, better, faster, and more eco-friendly) protocols which avoid the limitations of TCP.

    --
    Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
    1. Re:Q: What are they measuring? A: (read on) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, but what the hell are you talking about?

      TCP handles high speeds just fine -- what limits the speed of TCP is network congestion, which is as it should be. One of the guiding principles behind the evolution of TCP from TCP Tahoe (original BSD implementation) to the current TCP New Reno or newer implementations is to prevent crashing of the network when too many people attempt to participate. TCP handles this remarkably well by clocking it's transmission rates to actual transmission availability via ACKs or other prediction measures (variances is RTTs for TCP Vegas.)

      As it stands, TCP works just fine with very fast networks -- let me enumerate the issues (which the parent poster didn't bother to do):
      1) the sliding window needs to be big enough to accomodate the full delay x bandwidth product of very fast pipes. The TCP header has a 16b sliding window (the advertised window; essentially the remaining room in the receiver's sliding window); TCP has had for many years a well defined extension specifying a scaling factor for the advertised window.
      2) Sequence numbers (the seqNo and AckNo) are 32b quantities; they can quickly wrap around. For example, a 1.2Gbps connection will wrap around in 24 seconds. This, also, is fixed: the sender of each packet puts a 32b timestamp in an extension in the header; the receiver echoes the most recent timestamp in each ACK sent. Therefore, we have a continually increasing 32b timestamp and a 32b sequence. In practice, this works perfectly well.

      The only other complaint you could have about TCP is the so-called "Slow Start" -- slow only in comparison to immediately, upon connection creation, transmitting as much data as fast as the machine can go. The actual ramping up from start until congestion occurs is accomplished rather quickly via the Slow Start (slow only compared to dumping everything on the network ASAP or AIMD, which preceded slow start in the evolution of TCP) mechanism added as of TCP Reno. Slow start creates exponential transmission rate growth at the beginning of the connection.

      Lets work out a bit of math for TCP's ramp-up rate:
      Assume that a single packet is 1500b
      Assume an 8Gb network connection solely in use by the transmitting and receiving computers
      Note: 8*1000*1000*1000 = 8,000,000,000 (base 10 because this is a network, not base 2 as most computers consider data sizes)

      Therefore 5,333,333 full packets / second

      Note: 2^23 = 8,388,608

      Therefore, ignoring the transmission capacity used by incoming ACKs, and assuming that each packet is 1500 bits (ethernet is 1540b IIRC; payload is 1500), and using the exponential growth behaviour of TCP, we will reach full network capacity inside of 23 RTTs. That sounds suboptimal, but consider a couple things:
      1) that is a *very* fast network to have devoted to a single connection
      2) TCP is optimized to prevent congestion, which it does remarkably well. The relative slow start is to prevent collapse of the Internet, which is the situation that it was facing before this mechanism was introduced. Original versions of TCP, upon connection start, immediately dumped as much data as possible onto the network. This, in turn, meant that each time a new connection was started on the internet, there was a wave of congestion degrading performance for everyone on the network. This crucial work was done by Van Jacobson in the 1980s, roughly 8 years after TCP/IP was first used in a recognizeable form.

      You will also get lower rates because of ethernet overhead, etc, so the idea that we could move 5.3M packets in an 8Gb network is pretty specious.

      Note also that TCPs RTT estimator -- the original, the original modified by Karn/Partridge to better account for retransmissions, and the current one introduced by Jacobson/Karels -- all have no problem with very large RTTs. The algorithm, much simplified, looks like this:
      EstimatedRTT_{n} = alpha * EstimatedRTT_{n-1} + (1 - alpha)*SampleRTT_{n-1}

      where EstimatedRTT_{n-1} = the Estimat

  16. Well, let's get this started... by TwistedGreen · · Score: 1

    It was obviously Picard.

    1. Re:Well, let's get this started... by !3ren · · Score: 1

      Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!?!
      Captain Sulu all the way! /me grins

    2. Re:Well, let's get this started... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sulu? Don't you mean Solo?

  17. Mmmm... by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 1

    You can't overcome latency. There's a fundamental limit. I mean, satellite communication links have latencies of 1 second because of the speed of light, and you can't "improve" that by much. The latency is a side effect of the distance. Which means that you actually trade-off effective bandwidth when you increase distance because sustaining throughput with error correction gets harder.

    So a doubling of distance should get you bonus points! You can overcome system latency with fancy hardware, but you can't fundamentally improve distance effects. So as a pure measure of system performance, I think distance is key to knowing the true prowess of said link.

    --
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    1. Re:Mmmm... by dougmc · · Score: 1
      You can't overcome latency.
      You can, and you can't.

      If you're worried about ping times, no, you can't do much about it. But if all you're after is being able to transfer a massive file in a very short period of time, you can. Ditching TCP entirely and spewing the data via UDP packets, not even waiting for acknowledgements will almost entirely remove the effects of any latency. Only if the remote host needs to re-request any data does latency really become an issue.

      One brute force method to avoid that would be to immediately send all the data again. This would be silly here, but if you were sending a file to Mars (the planet) and the many minute latency was a major problem but you had plenty of throughput (but high packet loss), sending everything twice (or more times) might actually be a good idea.

      This is already done for some RF transfer protocols -- send everything twice rather than worry about complicated re-request protocols. More fancy methods involve sending parity/ecc bits that can be used to rebuild a certain amount of missing data.

  18. Bandwidth Challenge by tgpt · · Score: 2, Informative

    This year's Supercomputing 2003 Bandwidth Challenge netted some cool results in this area including 23+gbps inside the US, 7.56gbps between the US and Japan, and 8.96gbps throughput to a remote network filesystem using GPFS. There are even some pretty graphs. My former co-workers at SDSC were involved in a lot of this work.

    1. Re:Bandwidth Challenge by crimson30 · · Score: 1

      Doesn't Infiniband 12x provide roughly 30gbps of bandwidth? Or is this not a real technology just yet?

  19. Its 5.44 gb/s by noah_fense · · Score: 1

    Most call it the "Internet land-speed record"
    More info at http://lsr.internet2.edu/
    Also, the fastest router from juniper networks, to my knowledge, is the m160, capable of forwarding 160 GB/s. But, that is spread out over several interfaces.
    -n

    1. Re:Its 5.44 gb/s by noah_fense · · Score: 1


      The Records:
      IPv6 Category
      Single Stream Class: 6,947 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 7067 kilometers of network.

      Multiple Stream Class: 6,947 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 7067 kilometers of network.

      IPv4 Category
      Single Stream Class: 38,420.54 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN across 7067 kilometers of network.

      Multiple Stream Class: 38,420.54 terabit-meters per second by a team consisting of members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and CERN

      -n

    2. Re:Its 5.44 gb/s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Also, the fastest router from juniper networks, to my knowledge, is the m160

      Fastest Juniper is now the T640. Each of eight slots can have 4 x 10Gbit/s cards - i.e. 320Gbit/s (or 640 if you count in and out)

  20. how was this modded insightful... by mgoodman · · Score: 1

    rather than funny? wacky mods.

    --
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  21. Fastest transmission is well known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lookup the FAST (FASTTCP) project at Caltech. The problem is not the physical medium but the communication protocols. They have been working on a TCP variant that manages to fully utilise link capacity (which current TCP cannot do).

    All the info, as well as links to TONS of popular press is there. If memory serves, current record is well into the gigabytes.

  22. It's me and my roof top couriers. by slicenglide · · Score: 1

    I have a record setting Terabyte in under an hour with the Pigeon RFC Protocol. RFC 2549

    --
    John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
  23. Obligatory reponse.... by shachart · · Score: 1

    That's nothing, my home computer can trasmit 40 jiggaquads worth of data over gold subspace channel, to the nearest starbase.

    If I multiply the speed by distance, that's. Arggh! your puny hu-man Internet2 is like using constupated pigeons!

    --
    Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.