Slashdot Mirror
World's Fastest Internet Cafe
Thyrus writes "An internet cafe offering connections 50 times faster than typical broadband services has opened in Cornwall. Computers at Goonhilly satellite station, on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, are connected to BT's global internet protocol network. That means users can download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps). It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe. The service will be free to visitors."
First, I am glad they said in the UK, because 100mbit cyber cafes aren't special everywhere.
Also, I notice they have had to tip toe around what it can be used for:
Adrian Hosford of BT said: "It would be possible to use the cafe's computers to download in less than 15 minutes a file the equivalent size of the DVD version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its 19,000 illustrations, 629 audio and video clips and 100,000 articles.
It seems like they are trying almost too hard to explain how quick it is, afterall, I never rate my downloads in terms of how many "dvd copies of a paper encyclopedia with illustrations and video clips" I just say its shit-hot.
We need it in terms we can understand like how many TPG/s can we view?
will google earth run smoothly without appearing to break up or pixelate no matter where I zoom or rotate to?
can I wipe out my friends in CS:S by having a l33t connection?
Another article I was reading earlier about this mentions why the special people were chosen to open it:
The new internet café will be officially declared open by Helston Community College pupils Chloe Smith and James Evans, both aged 17, who have demonstrated outstanding acumen in the field of information technology.
from here.
(Yes, sisco appear to be hyping this more than the BBC, but then again they supplied some of the high tech equipment.
liqbase
The world's biggest Adult Theater is opening up next door. Coincidence?
+5, Truth
The service will be free to visitors.
61 dishes
For how long will it be free? I can't image the 61 dishes being cheap to maintain?
Emphasis mine.
But the article is "World's Fastest Internet Cafe" according to ./ mods. ... but then again we know how reliable they are, eh?
+5, Truth
100Mbps connections are not that uncommon. Besides, it's the overall download speed that counts, and that is often determined downstream from you local connection. The bandwidth bottleneck is rarely (if ever) your local connection speed.
Ok, you have this blazingly fast connection at the internet cafe...
What server, gaming or otherwise, will be able to transfer information that fast back?
I do have to say that this connection would be perfect for the final destination for the "relaying" internet connection in the $100 MIT laptop.
Joe
In other news, if they notice a suspicious looking network cable snaking out to the curb and in through a barely opened car window, it might mean that this former St. Petersburg, Florida resident has moved to the UK, and is, apparently, still not a coffee drinker.
So...it is free for guests, what if I want to move in? Would I have to pay for it :o)
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
bistromathics is the answer. Finally, they understand ...
Damn, "at a UK internet cafe" was supposed to be in italics. Oh well.
What's the purpose? Reading emails really quickly? I mean what kind of activity (other than nefarious) does one really need that requires that speed, when sipping coffee?
But how much does a cup of coffee cost??
Downloading starbucks latest revenues figures?
are you kidding me?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
...I can download inordinate amounts of images and movies to.. my screen? Or can you take it with you somehow?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Is it me or does it look like that backhoe just took a big bite out of the dish in that picture? Wonder how many megabits you can get with a a 5' section missing from your receiver?
An internet cafe can find a way to make money while offering service like this for free to it's customers.
And yet the poor ol' telecoms are having such a hard time making money due to Google stealing their bandwidth.
Bandwidth that both Google and end users already pay the telecoms for.
I first heard of Goonhilly from a hardly-noticed story I once read. Not being a European, I had to look it up at the time to see what the hell it was.
No real relevance, I just like the name Goonhilly.
[
Because it was an already existing center of high speed data connectivity and so they thought it would be a nice perk to set up a few PCs in the lobby and run a free internet cafe. It's not like they took an existing regular internet cafe and then decided it should be 100Mbit.
What is this ./ ? I don't know how reliable ./ is, do you ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
One needs 100Mb to the desktop to advertise BT and Cisco's superiority in press releases.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's an odd name. I'd have called it "Chazzwazzer".
RTFAH (Read the f****** article headline)
./ headlines need to read the article summaries.
Sorry, I mean, I know this guy clearly didn't read the summary, but in his defense, the *headline* does say "World's Fastest Internet Cafe." Clearly, the people who write the
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Why would you need a connection that fast in an internet cafe? Users will be checking mail and news, not downloading "Cornish gone Wild" Vol 3.
Well, hey, tentacle hentai doesn't download itself...
Unless they're doing better than average, they'll be stuck with the stereotype that their coffee is as bad as American beer....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
BT's global internet protocol network
That may be the most verbose/obscure way of saying "the Internet" that I've ever seen. And why do they imply that BT owns it?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Who cares? I can barely tell the difference between my old 4 megabit connection and my current 10 megabit connection. Servers can't even typically send it that fast. It only comes in handy when I'm doing multiple downloads at the same time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Someone's nicked your emphasis, mate. And before you ask, it definitely wasn't me.
...
Besides, even old people in Korea get gigabit access in their cybercafes these days :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Visitors" or "customers"? There is a distinct difference, mainly the latter pays money to the business for some coffee and gets the internet perks along with it.
Win XP Service Pack 3
Slashdot +1 funny -4 Insightful +1 informative -2 Redundant
Karma: Somewhere between SCO and Microsoft
Can't wait to do this wirelessly on my 802.11b notebook.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So far, everybody's response to you has been sarcastic, but I can see a reason why. With the way cafes are heading now, it's no longer just a place to get a cup of coofee. You can buy music and videos now in some of the cafes in the US. Not to mention the fact that most cafes are already filled with laptop users and not much else. I can imagine a time when IPTV takes hold that you would be able walk in, get your latte and panino/whatever, site down and be entertained over that connection.
Shouldn't that be RTFFFHFPNTTI, you can guess what the extra "f" is for.
PtPete
World's fastest in the UK! It's like those sports that only one country compete in. Every national champion is automatically a world champion. But UK, sorry to say it, you're not the only one with Internet and netcafes
pages show up before you've typed them into the address bar?
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
The activity centre was quite boring, as was the tour, and the selection at the cafe. The gift shop was a complete sell-out, they sold telephones! Anyway, the cyber cafe was not a pleasant experience, mainly due to the 'new' keyboards. They're made of pressed metal, like public phones, meaning that you can't achieve any decent typing speed. The keyboard is missing the ALT key, instead they had the bright idea of replacing it with a "www." key. The keyboard was embedded into the wall and was at a very steep slope, making it difficult to get around. There was some arse-backwards system where, if the web browser is closed, it locks out until a technician logs you back in. While the bandwidth makes it seem like a good idea, what good is it, when there is no access to portable media. Quick streaming media is it's only advantage, and when it backs out into the cafe, porn is completely out of the question.
I'm not sure how useful this will be in practice. Just because YOU have the bandwidth to be able to download X bits/second does not mean that the server(s) you are getting data from can upload at that speed. If I could get as much download speed over DSL as my ISP claims, I would be very happy; however, more often than not, the download speed is restricted not by my ISP, but by the server (either due to actual bandwidth restrictions, or due to explicit download rate restrictions enforced by the server).
Even if you could achieve those download speeds, would your hard disk be able to keep up with storing the data that quickly? My computer has trouble keeping up with download speeds of 1 Mb/s.
Indeed. What started as a gaming servers and Internet-cafe service (http://www.avatar.fi/) has now evolved into a full-fledged ISP (http://www.tnnet.fi/) with FAST connections. TNNet is FICIX (http://www.ficix.fi) member (Finnish IX point). Requirements include linking onto FICIX-1 and FICIX-2 points, 2 connections and gigabit conn is minimum. So they have atleast 2 Gbps of bandwidth there, also mentioned in http://www.avatar.fi/verkko.html where it is introduced in Finnish. Each of the computers at the have have their own, unshared 100Mbit connection. Now thats speed compared to that slow UK Cafe. TNNet as growing local ISP also have gigabits of foreign connectivity bandwidth also avaiable, making the UK place look like 14400bps.
Somebody go start up a Counter Strike server on those puppies.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
A company I worked for (now closed) delivered 4 gigabits of ethernet connectivity to the buildings it lit in 2001. We designed and built our own gigabit ethernet DWDM injectors to link in-building Cisco 3508 switches with Cisco 6509 switches in the CO. One of our customers was Web2Zone (an Internet Cafe) at 62 Coopers' Square. We never saw the kind of bandwidth spike that indicated they used even 1/1000th of the bandwidth, except when they caught code-red or some such Internet worm. We believed that the limitation was the destination server bandwidth. To compensate for slow servers on other providers, we made extensive use of static page caching to speed performance and reduce our bandwidth costs.
- Fzz
"Web 2.0" sites tend to constrained by server load, not outgoing bandwidth. With all that extra server-side work, servers are busier than ever. Notice how many more sites load slowly today. Sometimes you'll even see a page load stall because some JavaScript is waiting for an ad server. (Watch the bottom bar in Firefox to see what you're waiting for.)
For overloaded database-driven sites, page load stalls make the Web look like it's 1997 again. Craigslist is really hurting during busy periods.
It has been named the Goonhilly House of Porn. Blank CDs and boxes of tissues will be on sale in the lobby.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
geerbox, meet the UK's extremely pervasive use of CCTV systems. CCTV systems, meet geerbox. Internet cafes tend to have cameras. Expensive equipment + random people = need to protect expensive equipment, and in real terms that translates to marking it, locking it up, and pointing cameras at it. And they tend to keep the tapes, at least long enough to notice.
Hell, if you look, there are stories about Nigerian spammers sitting in a cybercafe with their laptop, being clocked in real time by angry sysadmins who happened to be in the neighbourhood, shortly followed by police (said spammer, with SendSafe still running right there in the system tray, then proceeds to unsuccessfully try to eat their USB pendrive).
No. Cybercafes, especially high profile ones like this, are by and large very poor choices of a suitable place to do such a nefarious thing.
Besides, it wouldn't matter worth a damn. Anyone who did their homework has known about Warhol and flash worms for years now, and realises that it's not the upload speed of the initial seed that counts, it's the upload speed of the first tier. You could hypothetically launch stuff through a wardrived wireless LAN, without a problem, or even slower networks; even dialup is enough.
And any VXer working to the current fads would release through a multi-proxy chain to an existing, slowly-infected (sometimes manually-infected) first-tier command-and-control botnet, to the rest of the wider second-tier botnet which would seed the worm's release in a distributed fashion.
And then when they have control of a bunch of machines, they rent it out to spammers, do DDoS extortion with it, and password stealing, and spyware/dialer installation affiliate scams, and credit card fraud, and fly-by-night child pr0n hosting and pretty much every other manner of other nasty stuff you can possibly think of doing with a bunch of random machines. Think distributed computing, only a little dumber, and a lot more nasty.
Oh, wait. That's exactly what they do already. Damn.
So in summary; no, you do not need high bandwidth to do nasty things. It doesn't even really help. You need low profile to do nasty things, and cybercafes are not, despite common misconceptions, really all that low profile. Most of the VXers that have tried releasing from cybercafes got arrested. Enough said.
"Computers at Goonhilly satellite station, on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall" Is this a real place or a fictional location in a Harry Potter novel?
"Computers at Goonhilly satellite station, on the Lizard peninsula"
Is that next to Sunshine island on the peppermint sea?
I have to say that I wish I could get that kind of bandwidth here.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Since December of last year, Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget have upgraded all 10mbit customer feeds to 100mbit downstream (10mbit upstream) connections free of additional charge. For this connection, I pay 350 Swedish Kronor per month, and this news would never turn up on the Slashdot front page.
Bredbandsbolaget serves over 300 000 households in Sweden, a nation of around 9 million. It's not some curiosity out in the boondocks or goonhills or whatever you call'em.
/ Per
Seconded. I also wonder about this with regards to the 100BT connections quoted in reference to the UK cafe. If the backhaul is only 1Gb, then I hope they don't have more than 10 clients connected when they're quoting 100Mb.
If I saw a cafe advertising "Gigabit Internet Connections," my immediate suspicion would be that they have either: (in order of decreasing crapitude)
A) Gigabit links to each machine, and then some shitty 128kb backhaul
B) A Gigabit backhaul, and then 10/100 links to each client
c) A Gigabit backhaul, and then Gigabit links to each client
The third case might, I suppose, be borderline honest, since theoretically if you were the only person in the cafe, you could enjoy gigabit speeds to the Internet, but that's barely practical. Although I suppose given the advertising of most consumer internet connections (advertising "burst" rather than continuous throughput, etc.), it's not as bad as it could be.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
that's keeping the average US broadband speeds so low. What company in their right mind is going to ramp up their speeds noticeably higher than their competitors if the potential for piracy is so high? In fact, couldn't offering such blatantly huge bandwidth be falsely viewed as facilitating piracy under laws such the DMCA?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Once again, RTFAS (Read The F****** Article Summary)!!!!!!! FREE FOR GUESTS
'Ello.. You're probably wondering what I'm doing here at this Internet Cafe Grand Opening. Well, the cheap bastards at GEICO have cut my hours, so I'm going for a bit on the side...So, let's get the word out, eh? Free rate quotes? They suck. Now, yer high speed internet cafe, that's the ticket mate. It's like a party with the whole world invited.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
When I download I notice that the 155 Mbit/sec fiber connection really pulls the data in. I only reliably see this downloading from tucows or while I'm doing a windows update -- otherwise I'd say most of everything we do here is remote desktop, email, web, etc. The 100M connection won't matter much. I bet it would help with games, but it being a satellite station (if that's where the net comes from) I gotta wonder about the latency. Seems to me a T1 would perform better than a satellite 100 meg connection for gamers.
Whatever, another waste of time
As an interested outsider (USian looking at a possible move to the UK in a year), what's the situation outside of BT? From what minimal research I've done, the cable folks seem like a reasonable bunch (heck, they offer way more bandwidth for less cost than I'm currently paying the AT&T extortionists [my apt building signed a contract granting exclusivity to AT I am so happy about that!].). Is there something about them that rules them out as a packet provider? I seem to recall there being WISPs, at least around london, are they a reasonable option?
:)
(More generally, how is the IT climate in the UK? I can read the job sites and look at colo prices and so on from afar, but that doesn't give me the pulse of the place like being there would. I'm a sw engineer and sometimes *nix admin, to give you an idea of the sorts of things I'm looking at.)
Sorry to bombard you with questions.
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Cornwall. Goonhilly satellite station. on the Lizard peninsula.
Is the ministration of funny names next to the minister of funny walks?
Just curious...
It enables them to connect to links like this quickly.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
"The service will be free to visitors."
...and paid for customers.
"Monster Island" was already taken...
Judge: In that case I sentence you to a lifetime of horror on Monster Island. [to Lisa] Don't worry, it's just a name.
[Lisa and others are chased by fire-breathing monsters]
Lisa: He said it was just a name!
Man: What he meant is that Monster Island is actually a peninsula.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
1 - everyone in South Korea has gigapop Internet - same speed as what you just quoted - and they have Internet cafes with similar speeds. Thus it's obviously not the World's Fastest, it's not the First, and it's not the only Cafe.
2 - everyone at University of Texas at Austin, most places in the University of Washington, and everyone else who goes to a reasonable research university has this kind of speed available, including in a number of Cafes on campus.
Oh, but if you want to claim "World's Fastest Commercial UK Cafe not part of a research University or College" - go for it!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sounds to me like you haven't been around much for the last few years. Alright UK internet access isn't the best but unless you live right in the middle of nowhere you can certainly get ADSL speeds. 90% of uk households according to this (alright I've never heard of them but it was this or theregister).
Personally I get 8mbs (theoretically) more like 6.5mbs in practice. Where I live you can get up to 24mbs if you feel like it. Telewest (if they are still called that) are trialing a 100mbs connection to a few select areas and offer 10mbs to their other customers. Let's be honest it's nothing like your description.
It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe.
Are you seriously claiming that there are no research universities with internet cafes that don't use gigapop Internet?
Look, we all use it to do remote telesurgery, splice genomes, and other fun things - and I'm pretty sure Cambridge is just one of many such research universities on our gigapop backbone that are located in the UK.
And I'd be really suprised in none of those university/college locations didn't have such a gigapop cafe, since we have tons of them here in the US on research university campus locations.
That said, South Korea is already wired - the entire country - at that speed, so World's fastest is an interesting and unlikely claim.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So just set up across the street, where you are out of range of their cameras, and use a cantenna http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna to extend your range if needed.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Let me tell you a story about the rest of the world, or, well - my little corner of it (namely Stockholm, Sweden).
We have 5 or 6 major internet cafés in this little town, and all but one of them have 100Mbps pipes.
What's the purpose?
Maybe it's because our idea of a internet café is a gaming center with 100+ stations.
Most games these days "require" more than a 512kbps pipe to run properly.
The one I used to work at saw peak traffic of around 50Mbps, regular traffic was around 30 - 35Mbps.
When you get a 100Mbps pipe for a few hundred euro per month (note: this is commercial grade pipes, no overselling), you might as well go for that - it's great advertising.
In other words, Internet Cafés = Gaming Centers = Internet Cafés.
That's how one of the Internet Cafés in Stockholm are doing it.
They've got the local place wired gigabit (with the funny exception of their servers, which are on 100Mbps feeds), but the external pipe is 10Mbps..
It's funny what a nice spin you can put on things.
When it comes to using the facilities, I usually spend a penny.
where a cup of coffee and a doughnut you wanted are waiting for you even before you even make your order. Oh, and they also have an internet of some sort.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm lolin' @ the "insightful" moderation. :)
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
slashdot css changes broke the 'i' tag for reasons of their own. they wanted to do something retarded with 'blockquote' i believe.
i stands for italic and should be implemented as italic. if you don;t have italic you can implement it as nothing. yes you are entitled to change the 'em' it means emphasis and is implementation dependent ie it's up to the browser and/or the css how emphasis is shown. but i should not have been changed.
the parent poster was quite justified in getting it wrong.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. While the state of high-speed connectivity in the UK might not be ideal, we're not doing badly and the rate of broadband uptake in this country is higher than pretty much everywhere else. You might have been right a few years ago, but things are much better now.
This is the UK we're talking about here. By coffee they probably mean instant Nescafé. No, that'd be London. This is as far as you can get from London in the South West. So we're probably talking about instant coffee from some non-name brand, the equivalent of Rola Cola. Whatever, it's probably not worth traveling there for either the coffee or the internet connection. Probably nice scenery though.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I mean what kind of activity (other than nefarious) does one really need that requires that speed, when sipping coffee?
You don't drink much coffee, do you?
If you are not pround enough to call yourself an American, then you need to leave.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I find it damn amusing that there is almost as much mirth about the name Goonhilly and Lizard Point as there is disinterest in the rest of the story. And the funny thing is that this is from people who live in the same country (possible the same state) as places such as: Coxsackie, Frog Suck, Monkey's Eyebrow, Sugar Tit, Shafter and the simply great Wanker's Corner.
m es.htm
http://www.philbrodieband.com/jokes-jokes_town_na
stuff goes here
** roudy MP style cheers **
Here here, this is the same company that fixed the price of most dialup services in the UK (read non-0845 services), then promoted their horribly under-reliable service with nightmarish support for just a little less (or trying to pursuade you to setup an account when you setup your phone line).
Then did the same with ADSL, while I could get 25mbit in France for 30 euro, I was paying ~30 euro for 256kbit in the UK when the bandwidth used by the people in France was likely passing THROUGH the UK before getting to America, so they can't bitch about bandwidth being too expensive.
In my latest flat I phoned up BT to get a phone line, 75 quid and about two weeks to get it installed.. Called up NTL instead and had phone and 2mbit cable within the week without any additional charges. BT can do anything they want to try and improve their image, but as long as they still fuck customers over there will still be web forums full of thousands of angry customers.
From my understanding 1080i requires over 20Mbits/sec throw in 1080p and higher capacities, maybe better frame rates and we can max it out today. What about background torrents? Caching other movies perhaps? Something like RDP with video support? Streaming US Channels through your RDP session @ home to your cafe in england? How about actual work, data intensive work? 100 megabyte binaries flying around? I could go on and on, no matter how much bandwidth you dream up there will be far smarter people dreaming ways to max it out.
Ah, I see, but are these 08's playing together/against each other?
With such prices, why don't these gamers have home connections?
Here in Korea, the last two apartments I've lived in have come with 100 megabit internet connections pre-installed. Activate service, plug in the ethernet, and go. World's fastest, my fat pasty butt.
New meaning to the term fast food?
Matthew Brundage
Silver Spring, MD
I operate a Cybercafe (along with two partners) in Springfield, Missouri USA.
We have 100 megabits of upstream bandwidth. I've sustained downloads of more than 50 Mbps.
The scary thing is, we get that kind of bandwidth at T1 prices here from our local utility company (ignore the prices on their site, they're way out of date).
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
Grandparent is talking shit. I've got a 10 meg cable connection here in the UK and it'll max out whenever the remoter server is up to it. I usually get bittorrent running over the 1000kb/s mark, pulling in 300 meg in around four minutes or so.
Customer support is as always understaffed. But I've never had a problem with them. Perhaps no more than 24 total hours of outages (that I know of) in five years service.
Job-wise, things are pretty good right now. Been better, but has been worse (.com bubble). London pays more but they'll get it back out of you (and more) with the cost of living there. Try Scotland, we're much more fun!
If you are not pround enough to call yourself an American, then you need to leave.
Now why would I want to go lowering myself by adopting the American label?
I'm a Texan ! :D
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