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?"

Comments

Obvious answer...

[i.r.id10t]

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

What distance...

[pvt_medic]

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.

Re:What distance...

[Fizzl]

Well... How about reading the articles?

truck

[capoccia]

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

Re:truck

[kayen_telva]

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 ;)

Depends

[topside420]

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.

Hrumph

[NanoGator]

"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*/

Who knows...

[gtrubetskoy]

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.

better question

[hankaholic]

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?

Did the poser of the question read the dates?

[dougmc]

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 :)

Only on the Internet?

[rmohr02]

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

Tat-14

[J2000_ca]

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.

Yeah how do you measure this?

[mnmn]

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?

Q: What are they measuring? A: (read on)

[Crypto Gnome]

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.

Bandwidth Challenge

[tgpt]

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.