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BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL
An anonymous reader writes "North Carolina researchers have developed an Internet protocol, subsequently tested and affirmed by Stanford, that hums along at speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL. The system, called BIC-TCP, beat out competing protocols from Caltech, University College London and others. The results were announced at IEEE's annual communications confab in Hong Kong." Update: 03/16 04:46 GMT by T : ScienceBlog suggests this alternate link while their site is down.
It would be interesting to know how far out an implimentation of such a protocol on a large scale is.
How can a protocol be rated faster than DSL? Shouldn't the rating be against another protocol? Did I miss something in the article?
101010b 2Ah 52o
Looks like the server just got Slashdotter 6,000 times faster than normal.
Use it to host your blog server..immediately? You've been slashdotted.
Too bad they can't change the speed of light. They can put as much data on the wire as they want, but it will still take 100 ms and 25 hops to get there.
More than enough BS
This seems misleading. The artical says:
"What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second,"
Which looks to me like it can figure out the maximum bandwidth of a channel in a fraction of the time it generally takes TCP to do it, so as soon as you start transmitting at 100mbit you are using the entire pipe. Sure, its 6000 times faster than DSL but its not when it is used over the same DSL pipe. This is for getting data accross faster when you have massive bandwidth, not for bringing broadband into homes.
Nerd: I've developed a program that downloads porn from the interet a million times faster than normal
Marge: Who would need that much porn
Homer: [drools]...oohhh..1 million times faster..
$cat
They forgot to mention Steam.
Can I bum a sig?
Don't worry. It won't be long before you have to suffer through a 30 minute streaming infomercial before getting to your desired bloated web page.
This is a very impressive development... but I have to wonder. Current home computers would have no chance of even processing fast enough to keep up with that speed. I wonder how long it would take to get to the point that they would?
However, the idea is exciting... imagine! Internet at the speed of computer.
It doesn't matter what the bandwidth of your pipe coming in is. It only matters what the connection of the other servers and switches is in the "internet cloud" At a rate like that, I would also wonder if ANY of the infrastructure we have in place would be able to keep up. Seems like something that wouldn't happen for decades.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Someone needs a clue-bashing with the OSI model. A new internet protocol that's faster than DSL?? So...it negates the use a physical transmission system..or...what?
There's 640 kbps DSL and there's 3 Mbps DSL...
I want it in LOC/sec.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
LAME! Anyone with half a brain knows that backoff kills TCP throuput. I wanted a new high-speed alternative to DSL and all I got was another lame TCP knock-off. What is this, something like the 12th new TCP?
Slowing down so here it is...
New protocol could speed Internet significantly
Posted on Monday, March 15 @ 14:04:08 EST by bjs
Researchers in North Carolina have developed a data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic. The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London. BIC can reportedly achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems.
From North Carolina State University:
NC State Scientists Develop Breakthrough Internet Protocol
Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.
The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London.
Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, said BIC can achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems. While this might translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye, the true value of such a super-powered protocol is a real eye-opener.
Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, and Lisong Xu, postdoctoral student, presented a paper on their findings in Hong Kong at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11.
Many national and international computing labs are now involved in large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energy physics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said, "Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped to labs where scientists can perform analyses and create high-performance visualizations of the data." Visualizations might include satellite images or climate models used in weather predictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead to massive congestion of current networks, even on the newest wide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energy specifically for these types of scientific collaborations.
The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller," he said. "Now we are trying to apply it to networks that have several orders of magnitude more available bandwidth." Essentially, we're using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the other hand, would open the floodgate.
Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working on developing BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. The key to BIC's speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. "What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in les
Researchers in North Carolina have developed a data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic. The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London. BIC can reportedly achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems.
From North Carolina State University:
NC State Scientists Develop Breakthrough Internet Protocol
Researchers in North Carolina State University's Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.
The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London.
Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, said BIC can achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems. While this might translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye, the true value of such a super-powered protocol is a real eye-opener.
Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, and Lisong Xu, postdoctoral student, presented a paper on their findings in Hong Kong at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11.
Many national and international computing labs are now involved in large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energy physics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said, "Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped to labs where scientists can perform analyses and create high-performance visualizations of the data." Visualizations might include satellite images or climate models used in weather predictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead to massive congestion of current networks, even on the newest wide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energy specifically for these types of scientific collaborations.
The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller," he said. "Now we are trying to apply it to networks that have several orders of magnitude more available bandwidth." Essentially, we're using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the other hand, would open the floodgate.
Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working on developing BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. The key to BIC's speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. "What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said. The greatest challenge for the new protocol, he added, was to fill the pipe fast without starving out other protoco
More than enough BS
To quote the part that says what the article is actually about:
That is one of the fastest slashdottings i've seen in a while. The technology sound's good, if only they can keep it cheap and readily available.
thisnukes4u.net
isn't DSL a hardware technology ( Layer 1 ) whereas a protocol ( TCP, or their invention BIC-TCP) is a layer 3???
Please compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges.
The article makes me laugh, really....
Costin
A new protocol that's 150,000 times the speed of current modems? Uh...I think the reviewer got a little mixed up here. There's the max theoretical speed of the transmission line, and then there's the speed at which the protocol can transmit over that line. While I'm sure it can make modems faster by transmitting more bytes, its not going to make modems 150,000 times faster.
A protocol that hums along at 1,000,000 times DSL speed.
I took the physical spec of DSL and added 1,000,000 lines.
The article is /.'d so I can't figure out wht this means - what transmission media/hardware are they using? I can make plain old TCP/IP 600,000 times faster than "DSL speeds" if I have hardware that meets that specification.
And a ferrari is larger than an orange. WTF is up with this headline? A protocol is faster than a signalling method. Great. To enhance the uselessness, the protocol's speed is measured in multiples of something vague, rather than megabits per second. Nothing turns up for "BIC-TCP" on CiteSeer, so we'll just have to guess until an actual journalist picks up the story.
Sure.. if you get rid of those pesky lower layers, data just zooms along.
Mirrored for when the site goes down/a.
6,000 times the speed of DSL? Wow.. if only places came up with content 6,000 faster..
:)
Quick! Someone alert the porn industry!
BATTLESTATIONS!
Bandwidth in reality is alreay cheap, there are protocols that are being used by the likes of cisco that make a 56k modem faster than broadband. Why is it not being implimented? The broadband companies need to make the money back from the investment in their infrastructure. Why upgrade to a 512k broadband connection if your modem can go faster? no need. It will be interesting to see when these actual protocols hit the market.
In answer to above the DSL protocol is the way in which your line is utalised to incorprate digital signals down a standard telephone wire. see here for more info
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
This article somewhat erroneously compares the speed of "DSL" vs the speed of "BIC-TCP". DSL is a link-layer protocol. BIC-TCP is an network layer protocol. These are different things. See http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp for details.
The question I'd love to ask the authors would be "so, what happens when I run BIC-TCP over a DSL modem? Does it suddenly become 6000 times faster?" I don't think so.
Connections are still going to be constrained by the underlying link speed, and the internet will not become thousands of times faster overnight because of this.
Sure, BIC-TCP looks like it's more efficient than TCP and that's a good thing, but the gains this protocol provides over TCP are in scalability when using suitably big links.
What they mean is that current TCP protocol becomes a bottleneck at high bandwidth applications, so a new protocol is designed that would be efficient up to ~6000xDSL speed (just a pot-shot guess, up to 9Gb/S?). It has nothing to do with pushing data down the POTS line, just that if one day you had a fat pipe to your house, this new protocol would make use of it properly unlike today's TCP.
It's a stupid comparison, but I guess they expect people to not have an idea what 9Gb/S is...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Does it beat out AOL 9.0 Topspeed technology?
Every time you read this, I am going against my principles.
Some group of morons somewhere will think this is for motorcycles, and they will be badly injured because of the extra speed.
Another group of morons will compress this data and market it for ten extra bucks to other morons who will eat it up.
Another group of morons from the Washington area will write proprietary code that cannot possibly make use of this technology, thus dividing Internet access.
Some dude with a floppy and a lot of time on his hands will use this technology to destroy mankind.
is how many libraries of congress I can download in a minute. *sigh* there should be mod points for campiness or lameness. Hense the anonymous coward :)
This becomes just another fast way to piss the RIAA off.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Wasn't there a time when 1GB of RAM would have been overkill?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I have developed a super fast car that is 6,000 times quicker than your driveway, an delicious orange that is 6,000 times tastier than your tongue and a new form of water that is 6,000 wetter than your garden hose!
Please send lots of money in the form of grants to
super inventor guy
123 fake street
v3n3r9
Is second this notion. Here in Australia users on broadband have volume caps beyond which they have to pay for data at rather high rates, or suffer from their connections being cut back to the equivilent of a 28.8 Modem (depending on your ISP)
The belief of USA based companies that bandwidth is "free" and that 30 second video clips are an acceptable form of advertising really hurts users in other parts of the world.
They've discovered gigabit Ethernet! Wow!
It's 6000x faster than MSN DSL, isn't it?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
High-speed networks with large delays present a unique environment where TCP may have a problem utilizing the full bandwidth. Several congestion control proposals have been suggested to remedy this problem. In these protocols, mainly two properties have been considered important: TCP friendliness and bandwidth scalability. That is, a protocol should not take away too much bandwidth from TCP while fully utilizing the full bandwidth of high-speed networks. We presents another important constraint, namely, RTT (round trip time) unfairness where competing flows with different RTTs may consume vastly unfair bandwidth shares. Existing schemes have a severe RTT unfairness problem because the window increase rate gets larger as window grows - ironically the very reason that makes them more scalable. The problem occurs distinctly with drop tail routers where packet loss can be highly synchronized. Bic-TCP is a new protocol that ensures a linear RTT fairness under large windows while offering both scalability and bounded TCP-friendliness. The protocol combines two schemes called additive increase and binary search increase. When the congestion window is large, additive increase with a large increment ensures linear RTT fairness as well as good scalability. Under small congestion windows, binary search increase is designed to provide TCP friendliness.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Mirrored for when the site goes down
Deja vu.
Comparing an actual signalling rate to "fast"? Where have I seen this recently?
Mirrored for when the site goes down
Comment removed based on user account deletion
here is a mirror since the website appears to be dead or near dead:
click here for mirror
Visualizations of the data? So what, are they gonna all smoke up and watch Rabbit-Hole or Smear while "analysing" the data?
The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller," he said.
Doesn't he mean the 1970s?
I've invented a pen that can write 6000 times faster than a pencil.
(fine print: super human strength required, in order to reach maximum speed alterations of the laws of physics may be necessary.)
PDF describing Bic-TCP
i thought was about 8mbs theoretical max, which compared to ISDN is pretty hefty, but squeezing gb's down telephone cable just seems to be the realms of fantasy
This article is much clearer. http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/rhee/export/bitcp/
"TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller,"
Is it me, or did they miss by a couple decades there?oh please, 6000 times faster might be what you say to some unknowing muppet you're trying to sell a modem to, but this is slashdot, we expect nothing more than bit rate, modulation type and SNR & bandwidth requirements without having to click on the /.'ed article.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
To be more exact, it's the bonfire system they used in Return of the King to signal to Rohan to come to Gondor.
It's called the Bonfire-Utilizing Light System Hardware Infrastructure Technology (aka BULSHIT).
They are comparing DSL (physical transmition protocol) vs a congession protocol.
you will still get lag in Doom 3 multiplayer.
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
Copper, Glass, Silicon and Pigeon
Obviously they are not using the new protocol on their web site.
-R
This new proposal of mine, of which I've already prepared seven previous ones, moves binary digits, or just "bits", along the "information super-highway" at more than a GAJILLION times the current speed.
*pinky to mouth, dramatic closeup, music swells*
That is, assuming mini-me stops humping the prototype, which I call Preparation H.
References:
[1] Long live Dr. Evil jokes.
Go with bald tires, less traction, and traction = friction.
Put them on your pinto... you'll go faster, you just can't stop!
Instead of reading it from a blog here it is the source press release at the college. .. Still looking for the actual paper though..
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
I hope none of you are planning to enroll there because of this. At least in the CS undergraduate department, I've found it to be a soul-sucking waste of time. I wish someone there would teach me something.
Ok, the article (especially the "6000x faster than DSL") doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's my take on it: they're talking about a new congestion avoidance mechanism.
Here's a super-simplified version of the problem they're trying to solve: Imagine you have a 3Mbps link to your ISP, as do 49 of your neighbors. However, your ISP has a 45Mbps T3 link to the outside internet. What happens when everybody on your ISP trys to download the Half-Life 2 demo at the same time, creating a need for for 150 Mbps at the ISP uplink? This is called congestion.
There are various solutions that you can use for congestion avoidance; you may have heard of TCP Vegas and Reno (I'm linking to the PDF document, because it contains a lot of math. This should also be a signal to you about how ridiculously siplified my explanation above is). Obviously, when there is congestion, somebody's got to wait, but determining who and how is not as easy as it might seem.
The new part of the problem is: today's fast networks have very different bandwidth and latency ratios to the networks of even five years ago. Vegas and Reno congestion avoidance algorithms don't work as well as they used to under these conditions. This paper presents a solution that does work well on today's high-speed networks. (Maybe somebody with more expertise could pipe in here with a discussion of "why the existing mechanisms don't work well, and how the new solutions address the problem"?)
I believe slashdot has already covered FAST, which I believe is a different solution to the same problems.
A mistake of this magnitude really calls for the removal of ALL of his geek-points, immediate surrender of any ssh keys, termination of all accounts on any non-windows machines, immediate discontinuation of WEP encryption, reversion to SSID "netgear", and unrestricted enablement of "File & Printer Sharing".
Unless he can demonstrate how a Honda can get more people somewhere than then the highway they now use... Well actually more like the license plate and turn signals on a honda but I'll let him off easy :)
Mirror for when the site goes down Mirrored in advance for when the site goes down it seems a little sluggish
It's not the US's fault that your country's ISP's are dickheads.
Ever notice how the "Newest, High Speed Internet" is always being developed around particle accelerators? Maybe they really are trying to change the speed of light ;)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
htmlified link to pdf of paper and webpage for the lazy
Lisong Xu, Khaled Harfoush, and Injong Rhee, "Binary Increase Congestion Control for Fast Long-Distance Networks", To appear in Infocom 2004.
jim
I'm in Dr. Rhee's CSC316 (Data Structures for Computer Scientists) course. He absolutely knows his stuff, but he can be very hard to understand sometimes. His website is here, with a picture of the guy that doesn't really do him justice. When he walks into the classroom, I swear he looks like one of the laid-back teachers that will just let you slide by through the course, but he *really* makes you learn the material, inside and out.
Anyway, if you're interested in a link to the original article hosted off of the NCSU servers, it is here.
-bigginal
In order for TCP to increase its window for full utilization of 10Gbps with 1500-byte packets, it requires over 83,333 RTTs [round trip times]. With 100ms RTT, it takes approximately 1.5 hours...
If I understand correctly, they are not making the inherent speed faster, they are just making the protocol able to understand the nature of the bandwidth more quickly, thus improving its ability to efficiently utilize the bandwidth. Thus, instead of requiring 1.5 hours to ramp up, theirs might take a few seconds or minutes.
My guess is that you aren't going to see huge gains from this for the average person; you'd need scads and scads of bandwidth in order to really need something like this -- TCP doesn't have any problem saturating a small 56kbps.
They jumped straight to ludicrous speed.
Improper use of the apostrohpe notwithstanding, it's not a "technology that needs to be kept cheap and readily available."
It's simply a more efficient Transport protocol (Layer-4). We're talking about an addition to the TCP/IP protocol stack, not a piece of machinery. It's a software change.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Maybe over plain copper wires. Phone company analog->digital sampling equipment (used between central office trunks) doesn't sample fast enough to allow speeds beyond 56K. Hence the reason there aren't any POTS modems beyond 56K anymore.
-
So we got a higher compression protocol now. Just try to put it past Covad, Cox, Charter, SBC and all the rest of them to start using it. All those jokers will do is put a tigher cap on bandwidth useage when they apply it, not to mention attempting to twist the protocol to their advantage.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Well done.
now you can slashdot unsuspecting websites 6,000 times faster
First, the actual paper is more informative. The crux of the argument is as follows.
If you have a fat pipe, say 1 to 10GB/s, standard TCP will not fully utilize the bandwidth because the congestion control algorithm throttles the rate. As packets move and there are no errors, the rate increases, but not nearly fast enough. In particular, it takes 1.5 hours of error-free data transfer to reach full capacity, and a single error will cut the connection's bandwidth in half.
BIC-TCP uses a different algorithm for congestion control that is more effective at these speeds.
End of news flash.
-Hope
Even if we saw this tech to our houses, the ISP's would still nerf the connection at some lame ass speed like 768k/128k. I mean, cablemodems are capable of 40Mbit and they usually nerf it down to 1.5 Mbit/256Kbit. And no, most nodes are not saturated; before they capped my cablemodem (which was after three years of using it) I used to see 10Mbit on a regular basis, and easily T-1 speeds on the upstream. I live in a heavily populated area.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
From the-wantssss-it-yessss-we-do-dept
This guy is way out there
"connects first time, every time."
What?
doesn't quantum information teleportation using entanglement solve this problem and allow instantaneous information transfer? imagine: pings of 0.1 millisecond to another country, or another planet. (solar system?)
watch "the money masters" on google video
- It is a transport-layer protocol, such as
TCP, making statements such as
"New protocol could speed Internet significantly"
(the title on the article page) a bit bogus, but "BIC-TCP 6,000 Times Quicker Than DSL" utterly clueless.
- It addresses the problem that TCP connections over low latencies get to adjust their windows faster than their higher-latencies buddies sharing a link, causing the lower latency TCP connection to get more of the bandwidth before the link is filled up (and both TCP's back off due to their congestion window).
- The window size is adjusted using binary search instead of an exponential increase; somehow this makes this new protocol able to adjust its window size to the maximum (representing optimum bandwidth utilisation) faster than regular TCP. Why this is remains puzzling, because both binary search and TCP (which uses a factor of the previous window size) should reach their windows sizes in logarithmic time, as both searches are exponentially fast.
The rest of the article can be summarized as harmless fluff and clueless crud, as far as I'm concerned."What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second," Rhee said.
This is very puzzling indeed, the article doesn't back it up in the least.
It seems to be just a very poor choice of units to quote (he was probably trying to dumb it down to something the interviewer would understand).
From the text of the article, it sounds like it's an improvement on TCP's congestion control performance (where it widens/narrows its transmission window to allow more packets to be outstanding between ACK's). Apparently they have some big improvements over current TCP, which allow it to fully utilize high bandwidth links. TCP takes time to expand the window and "fill the pipe". With the short-lived TCP sessions used for HTTP, this is not very efficient.
Of course, for a small fee, I'll let you use my super-duper protocol that offers virtually unlimited bandwidth - a buttzillion times faster than DSL.. it's called UDP. (UDP is very low overhead, no transmission windows, or ACK's -- or guarantees of being received.. You can stuff them onto a line as fast as it will take them.)
Although it is still impressive if it's compared to US DSL, it would be more so if it's compared to Japanese/South Korean DSL, which is topping in the 40Mbps range (for roughly the same price as SBC Yahoo! DSL [$30]; they have 100Mbps [up and down] for around 50-60bucks a month).
Leave it to an AC to post such a ridiculous headline.
Sometimes a quantitative change in technology leads to a qualitative change in society. Witness what the emergence of DSL has done to the music and movie industries.
Even if less than 1/100 of the claimed speeds were widely implemented this would probably signal the end of copyright as we know it.
Why? Users would be able to exchange a lifetime's worth of movies, software - you name it- in a matter of days or hours.
As socially disruptive as that might be one can imagine truly incredible new applications that would be far more socially disruptive:
Every internet user could in effect become a TV broadcaster if they so desired. In charge of not just one channel but many. The best channels, like the best blogs, could become hugely politically and/ or culturally influential. The big TV networks' grip would almost certainly be loosened far more than it already has been by the arrival of the net (I rarely watch TV these days, like many of my friends).
Even the above is just a microcosm of what could be achieved. Because if speeds of that order could ever widely implemented it would be like wiring together millions of neurons : you would end up with behaviour and results totally unexpected from examination of individual components of the system.
Knowing all the above how many people here are willing to bet that if the "Powers that be" see such a technology looming on the horizon they will not try to kill it or severely cripple it from the outset ? Personally, I believe that if a technology is commercially and technically feasible then, in a market economy, it is almost impossible to stop.
I'm more of a cup and string kind of guy! ;)
More than enough BS
site is slow so I mirrored it: mirror
Natural-Selection Be
for BICtorrent :)
[insert random lame remark about them apparently not using their shiny new tech cause The Fine Article Has Been Slashdotted here]
I don't get the description of the story. BIC-TCP, a new protocol that is 6000 times quicker than DSL. How can a protocol be quicker than a transport layer? Or is the protocol a new technique that achieves 6000 times the speed over the same infrastructure as DSL?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I suppose it makes sense that the semi-clued can't tell the difference between a transport protocol and a link layer protocol. The situation is futher obscured by the differences between the 4 layer IETF model for protocol stacks and the 7 layer osi model both of which are more or less obsolete when you start having things like link layer signaling effect what goes on in upper layers as many efforts in standards bodies aim to do just that or the converse.
Basically though, things like bic-tcp, and a lot of tuning that you can do to just plain-old-tcp are there so people with really fat network connections can utilize them in some sane fashion with a compartivily small number of data flows...
If you happen to have 10GB/s ethernet or oc-192 POS circuits into your office and need to move data in reasonable amounts of time this might be welcome news. There's nothing in here that amounts to a new link layer though, or really any technology that's useful in the near or long term future to more than a tiny subset of all transport consumers.
A reasonable desktop machine built today can do a passable job of keeping a gigabit ethernet link full which is fine if you have one, but not so useful if you don't. While the computing power I have personally available to me at home has increased by a factor of around 10,000 or so in the last decade, the actual speed of my external network connectivity has only increased (And I'm being optimistic here) by a factor of around 100 (to 1.5Mb/s symteric). I don't see and evidence that that would indicated that this is likely to change anytime soon, although if we follow the trend-line out another decade maybe oc-3 style connectity will really exist to the home. The gap between computing resources and available bandwidth doesn't really seem likely to get any narrower however. Thusly our ability to use data (of any variety) that we have to transport over a network is necessarily constrained not by protocol inovation but by the pidling little link-layer connections that connect our homes workpalces to the rest of the network.
is that 'his' protocol is really good at detecting when the pipe is full.
The ISP here in belgium has something similar, when they detect your pipe is at max capacity, they increase it by 25% until you hit 10Mbps.
Just sometimes a quantitative change in technology leads to a qualitative change in society. Witness what the emergence of DSL has done to the music and movie industries.
Even if less than 1/100 of the claimed speeds were widely implemented this would probably signal the end of copyright as we know it.
Why? Users would be able to exchange a lifetime's worth of movies, software - you name it- in a matter of days or hours.
As socially disruptive as that might be one can imagine truly incredible new applications that would be far more socially disruptive:
Every internet user could in effect become a TV broadcaster if they so desired. In charge of not just one channel but many. The best channels, like the best blogs, could become hugely politically and/ or culturally influential. The big TV networks' grip would almost certainly be loosened far more than it already has been by the arrival of the net (I rarely watch TV these days, like many of my friends).
Even the above is just a microcosm of what could be achieved. Because if speeds of that order could ever widely implemented it would be like wiring together millions of neurons : you would end up with behaviour and results totally unexpected from examination of individual components of the system.
Knowing all the above how many people here are willing to bet that if the "Powers that be" see such a technology looming on the horizon they will not try to kill it or severely cripple it from the outset ? Personally, I believe that if a technology is commercially and technically feasible then, in a market economy, it is almost impossible to stop.
My /dev/null is still faster in uploads.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Now my ISP Can shut me down for abusing Bandwidth after about 30 seconds......
Re-tarded! DSL is not "an Internet protocol." BIC-TCP (what, does it use BIC pens?) should be compared to TCP/IP, or, something..
:)
What's next? BIC-TCP is 1 billion times faster than President Bush? Probably, but it doesn't make any sense! (where is that "crazy" emoticon when you need it?
Must-not-watch TV!
Hey everybody! I just got a new computer that's 6000 times faster than the Internet! Wow!
The current TCP/IP implementation is described in RFC 2001.
The problem addressed by both that document and this new paper is that an individual computer sending data onto the internet has no idea what the total bandwidth to its destination is, nor how many other users are trying to use that link. It has to guess. And if it guesses too high, then not only will that computer drop some packets (forcing them to be resent later), but other users of the network will experience needless drops too. (The computer's guess at the bandwidth number is sometimes called "congestion window")
According to RFC2001, the computer keeps on gradually (linearly) racheting up the bandwidth it assumes the link can sustain, until a packet is lost (indicating that bandwidth has been exceeded). Then the assumed size is cut in half, and transmission resumes. This means that if you graphed the computer's guess at the bandwidth along side the actual avail bandwidth, it'd look like a sawtooth below the actual level.
The problem there is if you've got say a 5 megabyte file, and a 500 megabit link, it might not send AFAP because by the time your computer learns there's 500 megabits available, the transmission is over. That's especially likely if the line has both high latency and bandwidth. Many people have tried to avoid that problem by increasing their guess faster than linearly, like exponentially. But that may be unfair to other users of the network, squeezing them out and hogging bps for yourself.
Rhee's proposal is hopefully a way to allow super-linear acceleration, without stealing away too many packets from everyone else. (Remember that everyone else will eventually all be using the same scheme)
Silicon, Glass, Station Wagon, Copper, Pigeon.
It would be interesting to know how far out an implimentation of such a protocol on a large scale is.
It already IS implemented.
Or do you mean a large-scale "rollout"?
If so, why bother? Unless you have a REALLY fat pipe and need to use it all for one stream, of course. (But not many need to do that, and the ones that do can now install it on both end points.)
The phrasing of the article is leading to confusion. This is about a PROTOCOL, not about the UNDERLYING TRANSPORT.
The TCP protocol, with its windows, handshaking turnarounds, and timeouts, imposes its own limit on the speed of the data transfer through it. For decades the limit imposed by TCP was so far above the limits imposed by the data rates of the underlying transport that it wasn't a major issue.
But now some people are starting to have REALLY fast pipes. And for them TCP is becoming the limiting factor.
So now reasearchers have come up with a tweaked version of TCP that won't hit the wall until the pipe is a LOT faster than what YOU can rent from your ISP. (Unless you're renting an OC-192, in which you might be starting to fall a little short of its capacity. But if you've got OC-48 or below you're fine.)
When you CAN rent something over 6 Gbps, and you want to routinely use it all for a single TCP connection to get a REALLY FAST fast download, you might want to ask the nice professors for a THIRD generation TCP. B-)
Meanwhile, if you're on an ordianry connection you're not going to increase your data rate by a factor of 6,000 by switching protocols. You might get a little bit closer to the line rate with this SECOND generation TCP. But that's it.
Expect to see this start to gradually start showing up in protocol stacks as an option - automatically configured if both ends know about it and the inventors have come up with a backward-compatible negotiation. That way you'll be able to make better use of fat pipes when you can finally get them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
....now if they could develop a method of acquiring infinite bandwidth for their site.
(Bandwidth Exceeded)
It's just like when Alice mantioned to Dilbert and Wally that Human Resources was giving out powerful anti-depressants that "may cause unwarranted optimism about your dead-end job", Wally said . . .
"I gotta get me some of that."**
So where do I trade in my DSL connection? It seems awfully slow now.
**Dilbert 4/2/98
The 56k limit on modems was because of the 64k circuits phone calls had to be routed through. The 8k difference is due to requirement of converting the signal from digital to analog and back to digital again. The 56k limit was imposed on the lines by the phone companies. Which was further knocked down to 53.3k due to FCC regulations or some bullshit like that.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Also known as 299,337,984 meters per second. And mapquest shows the distance between Cinci and Minneapolis is 1,141 KM. So, that would be 7.6ms round trip.
or 186282.397 miles per second. Thank you very much.
This is pure bullshit. Whoever moderated it as 'informative' should be shot.
Sounds like a policy problem rather than an issue American's should be concerned with. Hopefully you can spare some bandwidth to email your ISP and complain.
If you run programs on a tree, do you always get log(n) performance?
Here's an alternate link for this story as the original site is having problems.
9 9. htm
http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/04_03/0
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Irony == a website about speeding up internet traffic burning through all their bandwidth and having to shut down.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
Nice demonstration... his (probably) DSL-hosted server is now slashdotted 6000 times as quickly as before!
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
and my car gets fourty rods to the hogshead. and that's the way i likes it!
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
Somehow this message seems funnier on a site about new internet protocol than your typical slashdotted site.
is it OPTIMIZED?
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
I can't get to the article (slashdotted), but I assume they're saying that the new protocol can transfer more information than ordinary TCP. Note that is different to a data rate.
If you reduce protocol overhead, you increase the amount of information while the data rate stays the same.
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Researchers in North Carolina State University?s Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today?s high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic. The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London. Dr. Injong Rhee, associate professor of computer science, said BIC can achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems. While this might translate into music downloads in the blink of an eye, the true value of such a super-powered protocol is a real eye-opener. Rhee and NC State colleagues Dr. Khaled Harfoush, assistant professor of computer science, and Lisong Xu, postdoctoral student, presented a paper on their findings in Hong Kong at Infocom 2004, the 23rd meeting of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society, on Thursday, March 11. Many national and international computing labs are now involved in large-scale scientific studies of nuclear and high-energy physics, astronomy, geology and meteorology. Typically, Rhee said, ?Data are collected at a remote location and need to be shipped to labs where scientists can perform analyses and create high-performance visualizations of the data.? Visualizations might include satellite images or climate models used in weather predictions. Receiving the data and sharing the results can lead to massive congestion of current networks, even on the newest wide-area high-speed networks such as ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), which was created by the U.S. Department of Energy specifically for these types of scientific collaborations. The problem, Rhee said, is the inherent limitations of regular TCP. ?TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller,? he said. ?Now we are trying to apply it to networks that have several orders of magnitude more available bandwidth.? Essentially, we?re using an eyedropper to fill a water main. BIC, on the other hand, would open the floodgate. Along with postdoctoral student Xu, Rhee has been working on developing BIC for the past year, although Rhee said he has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade. The key to BIC?s speed is that it uses a binary search approach - a fairly common way to search databases - that allows for rapid detection of maximum network capacities with minimal loss of information. ?What takes TCP two hours to determine, BIC can do in less than one second,? Rhee said. The greatest challenge for the new protocol, he added, was to fill the pipe fast without starving out other protocols. ?It?s a tough balance,? he said. By allowing the rapid transfer of increasingly large packets of information over long distances, the new protocol could boost the efficacy of cutting-edge applications ranging from telemedicine and real-time environmental monitoring to business operations and multi-user gaming. At NC State, researchers could more readily visualize, monitor and control real-time simulations and experiments conducted at remote computing clusters. BIC might even help avoid a national disaster: The recent blackout that affected large areas of the eastern United States and Canada underscored the need to spread data-rich backup systems across hundreds of thousands of miles. With network speeds doubling roughly annually, Rhee said the performances demonstrated by the new protocol could become commonly available in the next few years, setting a new standard for full utilization of the Internet.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
account suspended... at least we can still read it.
of course it's faster - they're using a frikken' linear accelerator!
"In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC),"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Its way to much information for an individual to barely begin to touch. Therefore impact would be neglibible. Lets see today in addition to my regular job I just want to peruse all the people in the worlds best creative gestures. Then i will have some coffee and fart.
Jeoin
Seen on his website...
BI-TCP is a new protocol that ensures a linear RTT fairness under large
windows while offering both scalability and bounded TCP-friendliness.
The protocol combines two schemes called additive increase and binary
search increase. When the congestion window is large, additive increase
with a large increment ensures linear RTT fairness as well as good
scalability. Under small congestion windows, binary search increase is
designed to provide TCP friendliness.
My interpretation: This protocol would transfer data more efficiently than TCP/IP's teeny tiny packets and quickly figure out the correct packet size to maximize transfer speed. For similar reasons that a congested ATM network shreds the performance of multiple large TCP/IP data transfers, BI-TCP works better than TCP/IP at higher speeds. If you don't have OC-oh-my-god between your end-points, TCP/IP will continue work fine for you.
I posted this same article at 10:00am this morning, but apparently, as usual, it's just not as cool coming from me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Note that there have even been inter-operability studies with "the other" next-gen TCP stacks.
Here is another site I found while googling for some more information. This website has a PDF document which seems to explain how the protocol works. However, I have not actually read the paper yet so I have no comment on it (I'm going to bed now. I'll read it in the morning).
I have no signature
What about the poor web servers that will see their bandwidth jump by 6000... Will they be able to keep up?
But now some people are starting to have REALLY fast pipes. And for them TCP is becoming the limiting factor.
Its pretty darn easy to get really fast pipes. Motherboards ship with Gigabit ethernet now, Gigabit switches are way down in price. Most companies these days are building their networks on TCP/IP, this could be a pretty big thing corporate networks, iSCSI, etc. 10GigE isnt all that far away either.
The much higher speeds on a LAN are a good point.
But.
"The Wall" for TCP is a lot faster within a building than across a continent.
The limit comes primarily from round-trip dealy - which is much shorter when things are microseconds apart then when they're milliseconds apart at speed-of-light-in-wire-or-fiber.
The limit also comes from timeouts after lost or corrupted packets - from line flakeyness or congestion. But line flakeyness is nearly nonexistent on a LAN. As for congestion, if you're using switches rather than hubs it's also not as much of an issue within a building as it is in a cross-continent backbone.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
FFRICTION = 'u' * N
(the symbol for mu did not show up)
6000xDSL...
/. readers to visit the site after it is first posted.
Gosh, you could fit 540,000 olympic-sized swimming pools in the distance that the pipe would cover in a second.
Or should that be, in the time it takes twenty five new
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Apparently the test was on long lines. But does this adapt well to the internet? All protocols are good for some cases but not for others. I don't remember which protocol it was, but there has been a discussion on the length of the packets, and US wanted bigger packets since they have long lines, while Europe wanted smaller packets because they had smaller lines, more hops etc... Instead of focusing on the speed, I'd like to see some numbers in different network configuration :).
Don't cry radio, someone still loves you.
(By the way, it's bloody stupid to use "W" for something that especially *lacks* wires. Like in "WLAN". Why didn't we have "Radio LAN"? Oh well.)
I wonder which gets rolled out on a large scale first; IPv6 or BIC-TCP?
~llauren
Shame on whoever put that title ("Faster than DSL") on this
posting. This is much worse than comparing apples and oranges,
it's like saying "a ferrari is faster than a tarmac road".
DSL is a low-level protocol for utilizing the copper going to
your house, and nothing in BIC-TCP is going to increase that
speed.
BIC-TCP is a solution for the more and more common problem of
really high bandwidth (say, up to hundreds of megabits, or
gigabits per sec.), combined with relatively long round trip
times. Like e.g. having a fiber from one continent to another,
or high speed satellite links. With standard TCP/IP your
transmission rate will basically be limited to
2^window_size_in_bits/RTT_in_seconds
(see http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc1323.txt). Try some calculations
and you'll find that this sucks majorly. BIC-TCP is meant as
a way out of this problem. It won't make your copper go faster.
Let's get one thing straight! The article should read researchers from North Carolina STATE...!
GO TO HELL CAROLINA! GO TO HELL!
I used to work at a place doing mainframe networking. We easily beat TCP all the time in speed tests, even at T3 (45Mb/s) speeds. TCP can't fill your pipe very well when your link includes a satellite in Geo-synchronous orbit. (think 1 second or more for the packet to get there) There are not enough windows in TCP for those situations.
However one thing we demanded was dedicated bandwidth, we could handle packet loss, but we made no effort to play nice with anyone else on the link. Course back in those days the internet backbones weren't fast enough to handle our customers anyway.
Fast TCP To Increase Speed of File Transfers? and 8.6 GB Internet?
But phone lines only uses 2 of the copper lines to get signal to the phone....
Maybe if you used all 8 you could get 4 times the speed, using in fact 4 connections...
In an Ethernet cable, all 8 lines are used.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Let's assume for a moment that this 6000x faster-than-dsl technology is adopted by, say, 30% of the current dial-up population (a conservative estimation). This would mean, that the bandwidth of backbones would need to be upgraded to... how much exactly? 1000x-1500x? Wow!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
that should prolly be about 3.6 miliseconds, not 32.,., .,
right shift by one decimal and you should be fine.,