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New Internet Speed Record
Himanshu writes "Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2's high-speed backbone.
The new record announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, Va., was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland."
Where do I sign up?
This brings a whole new meaning to "Downloading the Internet".
Finally, the Internet will be able to compete on a level playing field in terms of bandwidth with carrier pigeons. :)
--- JRJ
jrjBlog
"Recent studies by the U.S. Department of Energy have shown that researchers in high-energy physics, astrophysics, fusion energy, climatology, bioinformatics and other fields will require networks in the terabit-per-second range within the next decade."... and games as well..
If that happens, imagine the DDoS power from a group of infected Windows boxes.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
In order to carry the immense increasing volume of spam...
I bet they probably hit their undocumented bandwidth usage limit and will be getting a nasty letter from their service provider telling them to knock it off! :)
I could fill my 250 gig drive with pr0n in 3 seconds!
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
... but you have to have equipment capable of handling it. I know that there's certainly not anything existing that could make full use of a pipe that big... so I think everyone should keep their porn fantasies in check.
I can't see it in the story, how many wires/fiber pairs were used?
If it was a single pair, then DAAAAAAAMN...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Less than 10 years?
-Tru
How many Libraries of Congress per second is it?
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Now I can transfer my life savings from my bank in LA to my private Swiss bank account in .00000000001 seconds!
Next item on the palm pilot....
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Is anyone offering dial-up and shells for Internet2? I'm tired of the Internet1.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Yeah, but the swiss don't want you there. LA population decimated by malicious routing to /dev/null. Film at Eleven.
pushing the latest bootleg of kill-bill 2.. Nothing to see here, move along.
or Internet++
Uncompressed 1080i HDTV in RGB takes up about 1.4 Gbps. Where do I sign up :D
Yes, Jack Valenti, not only does this mean more downloading of pirated movies, it brings us closer to the day when the average 13-year old with an average computer will be able to download all of Hollywood in less than 45 minutes. Sleep while you can, Jack.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
That's over 66000 reloads of the front page every second.
Yes, I'm ignoring the obvious latency, but we can only dream.
The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
In other words, 2 of the, what, 1000?, 2000?, 10000? nodes on internet2 have exchange data super-fast.
Well okay, but I'm sure if you reduce the number of internet1-connected computers to the same number, you'll get really really good results too.
Comparing a semi-experimental network to a mature, heavily used one, is like comparing apples and oranges, and therefore I smell marketting under this speed record announcement.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I could fill my 250 gig drive with pr0n in 3 seconds!
Really? Hmm... the connection ran at 6.25Gbps. That's roughly 750MBps. At that speed it would take about 330 seconds, or 5.5 minutes to fill up your HD. Of course, there are some other problems as well (HD speed, etc).
Casual Games/Downloads
In Soviet Russia, the internet downloads YOU.
(couldn't help it...I haven't seen any good ones recently)
"This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection."
However for $19.99 you can get unlimited dial-up access on Internet2 which is only 5000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
10,000 times faster than the average broadband connection, but even the article states that that kind of bandwidth is not useful to home users yet. Then why mention it? How about this:
This new transmission is 2,796,206 times faster than a 2400 baud modem!
That's an equally useless comparison but at least the number is higher. You don't get to see a useful comparison figure until the 3rd paragraph where it says that the previous record was 4GB/second. They really should first and foremost tout the 36% increase in speed over the previous record. That's pretty impressive.
> Just think of how much pr0n you could download with a pipe like that.
If your pipe was that big, you wouldn't _need_ porn.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
10Mbit/sec Ethernet has been around since, what, 1980 and is still 20 times faster than my ADSL line, so I expect we'll all be flying around in our personal jet packs first...
I mean, my laptop can only do Gigabit Ethernet. Will all of that data just kind of smush up on the other side of the wall until it bursts the wire?
I have misplaced my pants.
Judging by the rate of increase in my broadband connection's speed over the last 5 years, it'll be about 5 or 6 thousand years before it catches up to these speeds.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
how did they do this? fiber optic? satellite? quantum singlarity?
who paid for this? government grants? private sponsorship? ice weasels?
who benefits from this? physics professors? lonely college students? pay per view movie download web sites?
can this technology be brought to individuals and businesses? yes? no? maybe?
what crappy reporting on such an interesting topic.
Microsoft calls it Internet#
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You won't see this in a home connection anytime soon, but you might see it within networks or between other backbones.
In the end, it can directly benefit the home user due to the fact that the overall bandwidth is increased, meaning that you and everyone on a backbone don't get bogged down by the 50% that are downloading/spamming/etc at higher-than-average speeds.
With a little experimenting, I found that 7 DVDs stack to a height of exactly 1 cm. The diameter of a dVD is 12 cm (radius = .06).
.01 = .0000161 cubic meters
.0000161 cubic meters/dvd = 140061.6601 DVDs
Volume of a DVD = pi * r^2 * h = 3.141 * (.06)^2 * 1/7 *
The volume of a large SUV:
"With rear seats folded 5-pass: 86.2, 7-pass: 79.9"
79 cubic feet is 2.26251604 cubic meters
2.26251604 cubic meters /
4.37 gigs / DVD * 140061.6601 DVDs = 612069.4546 gigs in one carload
Throughput speed = Data / (setup time + transmit time)
Assume a one-way transmission, one mile down the road. Assume the DVDs are packed in such a way so that loading the time spent loading the van is negigible (they're boxed well). Therefore, setup time ~= 0. Assume the van drives at an average speed of 60 mph.
1 mile / 60 mph = 60 seconds
612069.4546 gigs / 60 seconds = 10201.15758 gigs / second.
10201 >> 6.5 gigs per second. Sneakernet wins.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
6 GB/s downloads...but still only 128kb/s uploads...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
...RIAA lawsuit?
Because if everyone had a 100mbps pipe out of their house then the main networks would be slammed.
For instance at your cable company's hub, let's say they can handle a total of 100,000 mbps to the internet (yes i'm generalizing) and all the customers have 100mbps to them.
They would severely lose the number of customers they could have. As few as 1000 for full speed.
Or they could charge companies a premium rate for 100mbs internet access and the average Joe user a regular fee for 3mbps (which is sufficient). They would be able to increase their customer base immensely while still providing a useful product.
It comes down to a tree analogy. Either a tree trunk can have a few large branches or it can have a whole lot of small branches. It CAN'T can't have a whole lot of large branches or the tree will break.
According to the site, the LoC contains:
These are quick & dirty, back-of-the-napkin estimates:
Book/Manuscripts: (300 pp. x 500 words/page x 8 bytes/word) = ~2MB
Recording: (300 sec x 176,400 bytes/sec) = ~60MB
Photograph: 500KB (2k x 2k, jpeg q=0.8 ??)
Maps: Uhh? Vector? Raster? Hmm, lets say ~10MB?
So... throwing all those numbers together, I come out with roughly...
Oh, let's call it 250 Terabytes. (or 2 Petabits).
At only 6.25 Gb/s that works out to 320,000s, or...
only 3.7 days/LoC
Clearly, more improvement is needed... (and maybe bzip2 would help?)
Maybe you need the Einstein probe to cool them.
A highlight:
"To ensure accuracy, the balls must be kept chilled to near absolute zero, inside the largest vacuum flask ever flown in space and isolated from any disturbances in the quietest environment ever produced".
The owls are not what they seem
Only one third? You mean they can speed up the connection and also kill spam at the same time?
Here's your answer:
Internet 2
If you are wondering, "hrm, am *i* on intarwebs 2?"...most likely, no, but they have a tool to check for you, just nab it and try.
We use it heavily on campus and are quite active in the Access Grid. Great stuff.
Check out Access Grid for at least one reason that we may end up needing all of that pipline. Imagine for a second if you will everyone having a personal AG node...you can pump out 5-6MB/s without *doing* much of anything. Our campus bandwidth (which is Internet2 enabled) would be shot with less than 20 people. Imagine what we'd need if all 15,000 needed 5-6MB/s all the time?
Sounds far fetched, but then again a great many things sound "far fetched" when considered before their coming.
We'll need pipelines that big and bigger...just you wait!
At 6.25Gb/s, about 6 seconds. I can hear MPAA quaking in their boots. Or, if you prefer, you could stream about 600 DVDs simultaneously. *drool*
Yes... it's a SLOW day at work today. Blah...
In early 1994, I introduced the concept of the "Porn Barrier" as a way to measure bandwidth.
The Porn Barrier is breached when a home broadband connection can download porn faster than you consume it.
For many people, a simple broadband connection has already passed their Porn Barrier, and I congratulate them.
However, after years of caffiene, video games, and desensitation via usenet and other sources, my personal Porn Barrier is still well beyond current home bandwidth availability.
This article gives me hope that one day, I too shall know the joys of passing my own Porn Barrier in the privacy of my own home.
Maybe then I can finally put that regretful day in the campus computer lab behind me, aside from the fact that I'm legally required to register when I move so that the police can notify my neighbors.
The future is bright!
If, say, you were downloading a 20GB file...would the hard drive even be able to keep up with 6.5 gigabits a second? What does that translate to in megabytes?
Question: If that tree falls in the forest does it make a sound?
Answer: Yes, the sound would be. "Is our internet connection down?"
This is also the first time a Windows Server has won in the Internet2 competition:m l
http://lsr.internet2.edu/history.ht
Am I the only one who picked up on this? They portray this as a test of a standard IPv4 file transfer. They are only half correct. While I don't doubt they used IPv4, they certainly didn't utilize standard TCP which their implications of this being similar to other transmissions (unlike the IPv6 test performed earlier) is way off base.
For example, if this test were performed with TCP, the largest TCP window size is 64K. Since TCP transfers must have an ack every window, you can only send 64KB in the amount of time that light travels the 11,000,000 m and back through fiber cable.
Some basic information:
d = 11,000,000 m (each direction)
c = 199,861,638 m/s (in glass / fiber)
W = 65536Bytes (TCP Window Size in Bytes)
The theoretical bandwidth for a transfer over this distance using TCP window sizes:
bw = (W * 8 bits/Byte) / ((2d)/c)
bw = 4.763Mb/s
So basically they had to use something like a UDP file transfer. While this is not an uncommon thing, it certainly isn't anything as "typical" as it's made to sound.
"Within minutes of breaking the Internet speed record the elated researchers moved their entire DivX collection into a mysterious folder titled 'My Shared Folder', and began slapping high fives."
"When asked to explain their actions, the researchers only comment was 'Free pr0n!! Free pr0n!!' The exact meaning of this phrase is not yet known. -AP"
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
At 6.25Gb/s, about 6 seconds. I can hear MPAA quaking in their boots. Or, if you prefer, you could stream about 600 DVDs simultaneously. *drool*
Alas, even RAM-based SAN devices can't keep up with that bandwidth by half. Time to use latency of network loops as a storage mechanism. =)
It CAN'T can't have
So.. it can?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Why post this as an "Internet speed record" when obviously this is not the same thing as an Internet2 speed record. I'm much less impressed with the speed of some semi-private network that most of us will never have anything to do with. Speed up the Internet for the rest of us, and you'll have story.
It's crazy to think that the speed they are getting of approx. 800 MB per sec transfering from LA to Europe is faster than the effective bandwith of PC133 RAM to the CPU.
The majority of the computers in this world are probably using PC133 RAM.
kd
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity