World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps

paulraps writes "A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" An article in Press Esc notes an analyst study of the increasing demand for fiber-to-the-home in Europe.

Comments

Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?

That's what I thought.

She is able to "enjoy" nothing on her connection except the same internet to which we all have access. Sure, you can argue that as such bandwidth penetration becomes commonplace, services will be built to support it - like HD movie downloads or live HD IPTV. But as of now, this is nothing more than a technology demonstration, even though the article lamely begs to differ ("This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.")

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.

Doubtful. (Why even say this? To impress upon people that a high bandwidth connection isn't "hard" to use? Wouldn't the new computer she ostensibly got, since, as the article notes, she's never owned a computer in her life, have come with Windows installed?[1])

The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

Great, now all we need is fibre going to every home on earth, and the problem is solved!! Why look at wireless when we've got fibre?

...

I understand the point they're trying to make: that a high speed connection that enables the kinds of things such bandwidth allows is technically feasible to a home. But the problem is the same one we've always had - namely, the "last mile" - and this does nothing to solve that in the least.

"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.

Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX and UMTS Rev 8 are at least an option worth considering as a solution to the "last mile" problem?

Overall, a great PR stunt.

4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])

[1] For the real contrarians among us, yes, I'm well aware that systems can be built and purchased without Windows. But if the goal was to get a computer that will ultimately be running Windows, and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again? Exactly.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[grub]

Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?

PirateBay, of course. One of Sweden's national treasures.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[dualityshift]

Out of the box PCs come with pre-installed software, if you're buying from the big box stores, or major computer companies. The smaller shops will build a machine for $x. If you want the OS installed, it costs $x plus $software cost plus $install fee. Just because you've never built your own new computer, or bought a barebones box, does not make it unlikely to happen in the real world. I think someone's got network envy.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Shadow Wrought]

PirateBay, of course. One of Sweden's national treasures.

At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds she is the PirateBay. Now that's who he should have given the connection to. I doubt her secret lutefisk recipe is going to need quite that much bandwidth.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

the point is that she are capable to "enjoy" this, not infact able

What makes this even more fascinating is that this region, Karlstad, isnt that big that you might think only 58 544 people big.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[cayenne8]

"Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?

PirateBay, of course. One of Sweden's national treasures."

EEEWwwww......Granny Porn!!!!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

Heh. I include a disclaimer saying just that, and someone still responds:

[1] For the real contrarians among us, yes, I'm well aware that systems can be built and purchased without Windows. But if the goal was to get a computer that will ultimately be running Windows, and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again? Exactly.

And no, since I'm sitting on a gigabit network on a 10Gbps backbone connected to Internet2/Abilene and BOREASNet, I don't have "network envy". This is a publicity stunt, plain and simple.

Even 10Gbps PCIe NICs for computers only push about 6-7Gbps...to claim that a 40Gbps connection to an old lady's house is anything BUT a publicity stunt is laughable. Doesn't quite have the same ring as doing the same test between laboratory or corporate facilities, does it?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Teun]

What made you think a standard machine could handle this type of network throughput?
Of course it's hard to install Windows on such a specialised beast! (A *nix would have been the logic choice.)

And why are you claiming this does not cure the Last Mile problem when this is story is all about fibre straight in the home?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

What made you think a standard machine could handle this type of network throughput?
Of course it's hard to install Windows on such a specialised beast! (A *nix would have been the logic choice.)

Without more information, I highly, highly doubt that her computer itself is equipped to handle 40Gbps of sustained traffic throughput...

Even IF Windows needed to be installed on a machine, it's false to say that was the "hardest part" of enabling an experimental 40Gbps connection to a residence.

And why are you claiming this does not cure the Last Mile problem when this is story is all about fibre straight in the home?

Um, are you serious?

The fibre still needs to get to the home. That's the critical piece of the puzzle, not what you can do with it once it's there.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody even looked at what the cost is for a 40Gbps interface card? (OC-768) There ain't no way you can call this cost effective.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[deweycheetham]

Yep, PR Stunt looking for investors, looks like he wants Microsoft or Cisco to write him a check.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

Cisco is "writing him a check" every two weeks, considering he works for them. ;-)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[sqldr]

Why look at wireless when we've got fibre?

Because there simply isn't enough bandwidth in the air itself for fast wireless. When 3G came out, an engineer I drink beer with often gave me the full SP on why video telephony would never take off. Basically, because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.

This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.

This also goes some way to explaining why HDTV is a bit of a con, especially if you're using a dish rather than cable. Firstly, if you broadcast HDTV at the same bandwidth as normal TV, even with mpeg-4, it looks worse, because the artifacts are more visible. So you could use more bandwidth for a nicer looking channel? Yep.. at cost..

For an important show, eg. a world cup soccer match, the content provider can pay the broadcaster for extra bandwidth for the 90 minute duration of the match, and it looks great. Unfortunately, if the match goes into extra time, the bandwidth lease drops, and the remaining 30 minutes of footy look like crap! I'm not joking, this actually happens.

Sure, we can reduce the wavelength and improve the compression, and it will improve over time, but the laws of physics in the realm of wireless are somewhat more restrictive than those of physical wiring, and we're a long way off getting anywhere near the quality that we're being hyped.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[e-scetic]

Hey dumbass, by saying the hardest part was installing Windows he's saying it wasn't hard at all.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Xzzy]

I hope she's got terabytes worth of ram.. because now the bottleneck is her hard drive and I guarantee she'll hever see that transfer rate unless the data is thrown away as soon as it hits the application.

My (aging) PATA based system can't even handle 2MB off the internet, which I can get from a couple websites that just so happen to be hosted at the same site my employeer peers at. 40Gb? Disk platters would fly out of the case.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Fred_A]

Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"),

Not so long ago it was the wireless that was old fashioned with all those youngster listening to their transistor radios...

"Bah, I'm off to see the Intarhwebs on the wireless, call me when the soup's ready."

Re:Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

Hey dumbass,

I understand they point they were trying to make: that using such a high speed connection, when commoditized someday, isn't "hard" or "complicated". A good point to want to make, considering it was a PR stunt.

The truth of the matter is that since this is an experimental connection using experimental equipment, it was probably set up by Cisco network engineers, was in fact extremely expensive and "hard" to set up, and required fibre routing through specialized facilities and equipment.

Sure, the point is that such a connection could be just as "easy" to set up and use as a cable modem or DSL in the future. But it isn't now, and to go out of their way to say "the hardest part was installing Windows" (when I'm guessing they didn't have to "install" Windows at all) is a little transparent. This is a technology demonstration and a PR stunt, plain and simple.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[BLKMGK]

Here's one for you - what do you think would happen to that computer if she did actually find a source out there that could download at speeds anywhere near what has just been advertised for her? I once had access to a really high speed connection on a corporate LAN and was downloading from another corp a set of ISO for some software - concurrently. I didn't think much about the download until my mouse began to respond more slowly and the system started to become unresponsive. When I investigated I found that the data was coming down so fast the Windows PC was choking (WIN2K). The HD light was solid and the drive was chunking as fast as it could. I do not recall the speed at the time but it was faster than anything I've ever come close to at home - damned impressive except for Windows choking. I'd be damned surprised if Windows of any flavor is going to be able to handle the speeds they are talking about here - but would love to test it :-)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[deusieeee]

4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1]) That newly purchased PC may have came with Microsoft Vista preloaded.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[TheRaven64]

My (aging) PATA based system can't even handle 2MB off the internet,

My laptop can write at between 10MB/s and 30MB/s, depending on where on the disk you are writing. 30MB/s is 240Mb/s. If you built a RAID array out of laptop disks, you would need 170 of them at best, 510 at worst to be able to store the data.

On the other hand, when your network is faster than your disk, the only things worth storing locally are things that need fast random access to (latency is still going to be bigger over the network than the disk).

The point of a 40Gb connection is not what you can do with it, it's what you can't, and the thing you can't do is saturate it (easily). Until disks and CPUs are a few orders of magnitude faster than they are now, 40Gb/s is effectively infinite bandwidth, and that's what makes it interesting. What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mikkelm]

Last mile fibre to the home is no more difficult than establishing copper to the home in a typical urban environment.

When you're laying copper, you're running it to the CO. When you're laying fibre, you're running it to building/premises/neighbourhood access layer switches. The latter is a cheaper solution than building a fully-fledged CO. It's no significant hurdle compared to copper. Both need digging, and that's pretty much all there is to it. The ISP I work for does fibre to the home, and we have one of the best per-customer profit margins of all European ISPs. Last mile fibre to the home is -not- an insurmountable task.

In rural areas, copper is cheaper, but in rural areas, many people still only have 56k dial-up, too, and at that kind of bandwidth and latency, satellite connections are a much better choice anyway.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[janrinok]

But not every PC in the world comes with Windows installed. There was a /. topic a day or two ago about computers in China which don't have Windows installed - legal or illegal. I have bought computers that had no software installed. It could happen in Sweden, but I don't know for sure. Just because you cannot buy one easily doesn't mean that the rest of the world suffers from the same constraints.

You are spot on regarding capability (1,500 HDTV channels) versus availability (more data than she can ever assimilate but only the same data to which we all have access).

Don't mock the possibility of fibre (European spelling for the Nazis that might be out there...) to every home. Much of Europe (and perhaps other regions also) has managed to avoid the problems that seem to plague internet connections in the USA. Whether its copper or fibre (although copper is far more common) it is unbundled and the user can opt for the best provider rather than being locked into whoever installed it.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[aaronl]

You still use a radio to signal on copper wiring. Cisco may have been talking about wireless, but it's more likely that they were just talking about fibre optic as the way of the future rather than copper lines. You can transmit a high speed signal much further, and much faster, without amplification over fibre optic than you can over copper. It's trivial to run gigabit over a fibre cable that's miles long, but you really can't do that with traditional copper line.

For more information, this is how things like cable modems work:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_ modulation
And this is how Ethernet works:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_physical_lay er

You should notice quite a bit of similarity between the two! Wireless looks a bit like both of the above, but with more care paid to exacting power levels and frequencies. A wire is a lot like having the whole RF spectrum all to yourself. The problem with wireless is that it's a shared medium... the more users you have, the less everyone can do.

You are right in that this doesn't solve the problem of the last mile. It does show that you don't need nearly as much support equipment to do what we do today, in that you can serve a much larger area from a single hub by doing it this way. This also shows that very high throughput long haul links are a lot easier and cheaper than telecoms let on.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[geekoid]

Yes, but it was also a test of a new modulation technique, and a lower cost of implementation.
interesting that they ran it 2000 Kilometers to a home. I doubt they laid new cable just for this test. So, what did they add? What hardware did the women need to have put into the ground?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Dahamma]

because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.

There are already cameras on every corner, I'm sure they can handle antennas as well...

This is why GPRS is charged per packet, not for time "online" (technically, you're always online with GPRS). Each packet goes to every phone signed on that mast. Think of the multiplexing.

That's what the Internet is all about. IP is packet based and multiplexed. Do you think you have your own dedicated connection to slashdot servers? Also: yes, GPRS is packet based, but not necessarily charged per packet. Many people pay a flat rate for GPRS, just like Internet access.

This is the same argument people use to claim DSL is better than cable. Well, I can't get more than 3mbps DSL with their "dedicated line". I just switched to cable for the same price and get bursts of 20Mbps, with 6+Mbps continuous.

Basically, this really fact-free article is claiming that fiber is "cost effective" but doesn't say the slightest about the cost. I guarantee it costs thousands of dollars to install per home, and that's just the last mile, not the massive changes and upgrades that would be required to support this bandwidth that has no useful application to the home for 99.9% of the public. Download an HD-DVD in 2 seconds? To WHERE? Try copying a 30GB file between 2 PCs with GiGE on the same LAN (or even 2 HDDs on the same computer). If it takes 2 seconds, I will pay for your FTTH installation.

Just as the OP said, this is purely a Cisco-sponsored publicity stunt.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[iminplaya]

I doubt her secret lutefisk recipe is going to need quite that much bandwidth.

No, but her new TV program might

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Qzukk]

Oh, she will, will she? And this content comes from where, exactly?

Nice try, but this time the point you're trying to make is flat out wrong thanks to the internet providers pushing their own VoIP and TV services over their pipes. The content would come directly from the service provider and enjoy every last bit of bandwidth the user has between the service provider and the user.

and a corporate giant like Cisco is buying it, it would have been purchased without Windows why, again?

Who knows? Maybe because Cisco's windows site license/"software assurance" plan doesn't cover grandmothers using it in their homes?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[harrkev]

I doubt her secret lutefisk recipe is going to need quite that much bandwidth.

Yes, but instructions for various TREATMENTS needed after eating lutefisk might take up that much bandwidth.

Seriously though, what would you even do with this? It IS a tech demo. Unless you route all data to dev/null, the average PC can't drink from this sort of firehose.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Junta]

Even 10Gbps PCIe NICs for computers only push about 6-7Gbps... Not to take away from your point, but 10GE PCI-E NICs do exist that can push things at about line rate. They use 8 PCI-E 1.0 lanes to ensure sufficient bandwidth to do so, so a hypothetical system teaming four such NICs would use up 32 lanes of PCI-e (16 if you go to PCI-e 2.0). Even at 16, you'll have a hard time finding a chipset that can accommodate that and disk storage and graphics.

Oh, and to further strengthen your argument, current storage technology has a theoretical throughput of 3.0 Gbps per disk. Assuming you could acheive 40 Gbps to a functional PC, you'd need a 14 drive non-redundant array to even theoretically have the numbers to download to disk, of course, that would require an equal number of pci-e lanes to get to a hypothetical controller that could handle the throughput. If trying to use a ram-backed storage strategy, you'd use up all memory of, say, 8GB in less than two seconds. Unless 4 GB of data can be discarded per second, that won't work either.

So, absolutely for any realistic home use, the throughput in the article is useless, since no media has currently ludicrous requirements where 4 GB of data per second can be consumed and discarded per second, and storage becomes the bottleneck for downloading. There exist applications that can benefit from transferring that much data over a network, crunching on it and being done with 4 GB datasets in a second, but they are few and far between and none really applicable for a home computer.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[daveschroeder]

As I said, "Sure, you can argue that as such bandwidth penetration becomes commonplace, services will be built to support it - like HD movie downloads or live HD IPTV.

But in the meantime, "this is nothing more than a technology demonstration."

Try reading my post next time. I understand the points they're making, but that doesn't change the fact this is an experimental demonstration and a publicity stunt for Cisco.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[timeOday]

With so much bandwidth, why "download" at all? (By download I mean copying data from a remote hard drive to your local hard drive). That's essentially using your hard drive as a cache, which doesn't make sense if your network is faster than your hard drive. You could use a dumb terminal - or even just a TV with the addition of controllers - even to play 3d video games.

I think a cool experimental linux distro would have a single master image sitting on a server somewhere. All "installations" of this distro would be images of that master, with components merely cached locally (due to today's slow net speeds) and updated automatically. The image would have every imaginable app installed, but only the parts you used recently would be using up space on your drive. Does this exist?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[sYkSh0n3]

They weren't lying about having to install windows. The new computer came with Vista and he had to upgrade to XP. :D

but seriously, I tried 6 meg cable for a while, and decided it wasn't worth the cost. Webpages already came up instantly, so the extra speed didn't help there and downloads still ran the same speed most of the time because most of my sources didn't have enough upload to max my connection out/my hardware can't write that fast (I never did the math, but it's one or the other.) I went back to the 3 meg and can't tell a difference, except for the extra 50 bones in my pocket. If the extra 3 didn't make a difference, what's another 37 gonna do?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[linguizic]

What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue? I'd still bitch about the internet being too slow. Seriously though, imagine the platform that this kind of bandwidth would provide spammers and malware vendors? When my mother-in-law first got a really fast DSL connection it didn't go any faster than her dialup until I removed all the spyware from her machine.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

So this is this why PirateBay's new image hosting service was offline last time I checked. Granny sucked it all down her pipe.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

"fly from the case" would be a better in that joke.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Fred_A]

the point is that she are capable to "enjoy" this, not infact able

No no, the purpose of the fibre is to remove the cap.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[glwtta]

Holy crap, you can include as many "disclaimers" as you want, but you still spent like three paragraphs on them saying that they installed Windows. What did you want them to say instead, that "studies have shown that MS Windows has a lower TCO than OpenBSD"?

If they installed Windows, they installed fucking Windows, OK? The point is that the fibre wasn't hard to configure.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[max1mus]

Woohoo!! She don't need no internet connection after a day. She will download the whole internet. But where to store it?? If only she could use the Earth as a hard drive..:-D technology drives innovation..;-)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Cosmicalstorm]

In Sweden the cheapest computer to buy is usually (I dont know if it's possible in the USA) the "non-assembled" (not sure about english spelling) computer, the price will be ~$100 lower, but you'll have to put it togheter and install everything yourself, wich can be a somewhat excruciating procedure in many cases. So the part about it being a PITA to install Windows is not necessarily a lie.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[colin_faber]

This is less of a problem if you're using a clustered file system (lustre.org) for instance. We generally see anywhere from 80 to 140 gigbytes a second over large clusters. Additionally 10gige, iWarp, and IB cards are NOT cheap and the simple hardware (switches, etc) to connect them together are even more pricey. This kind of speed is still really commercial only, and is completely impractical for the average China special PC user.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[dsginter]

What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?

Get rid of all of these hard drives.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[hcdejong]

Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX [wikipedia.org] and UMTS Rev 8 [wikipedia.org] are at least an option worth considering as a solution to the "last mile" problem?

An option? There's no wireless technology in sight that can deliver anywhere near 40 Gbit/s, let alone deliver multiple streams at that speed in an area. A 40 Gbit/s stream encoded with e.g. 256QAM (256 bits sent as a single signal) still needs 156 MHz of bandwidth. You need the entire radio spectrum to transmit 10 channels at this speed. This means wireless technologies are only a 'last mile' option in areas with low-density population.

Besides, given the awful performance of current WiFi standards [1], I really don't want my high-speed link to depend on radio technology.

1: at the slightest provocation, my 802.11g network delivers no more than 10 Mbit/s, making it annoyingly slow for large file transfers. I'm sticking with 100Base-T for anything but casual websurfing.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Geek of Tech]

>Overall, a great PR stunt.

>4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])

I agree. She needed to install (Linux || BSD || BeOS || OpenDOS || Jaguar || You're favorite non windows OS here)...

Oh, what? That wasn't the point you were trying to make... Oh, right...

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Vancorps]

You've pretty much described the concept behind Cisco WAAS - Wide Area Acceleration Service. It caches locally to reduce transmissions over the wire intercepting packets as necessary. If you lose your connection to HQ then WAAS will continue to function as a replacement server responding to common packets as it did when everything was online. In this mode the data is read-only but still accessible. It's interesting technology to say the least. Cisco is not the only manufacturer with technology like this although its the only implementation I've personally seen in action.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[cnettel]

That's why, even in urban areas, DSL is winning big over dedicated copper. No new cables over the last mile wins over any other solution, for existing buildings.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[walt-sjc]

I don't know about you, but some of us geeks have more than one PC, more than one TV, more than one phone, etc.

40Gb seems like a lot TODAY, but what about in 20 years? Don't know about you, but I sure don't want to be stuck at a measly 384Kb/1.5Mb DSL connection 20 years from now. Some areas of the country don't even have that! Unless we start an ambitious FTTP project nation wide in the US, including rural, we are going to be a backwater country on par with Ethiopia.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[lobStar]

I understand the point they're trying to make: that a high speed connection that enables the kinds of things such bandwidth allows is technically feasible to a home. But the problem is the same one we've always had - namely, the "last mile" - and this does nothing to solve that in the least.

I think this problem is now largely solved. This system uses a standard fibre-to-the house installation provided by the municipal-owned Karlstads Stadsnät (Karlstad City Network). Such connections are installed in hundred (thousands?) of houses and apartments across the town. Currently they are just used for up to 1 Gb/s, but this shows the network is future-safe for the next, say...40 years?

And, yes, I live i Karlstad, and have many friends who use it at speeds up to 100 Mb/s. Myself, I live a bit off so I'm stuck with a 8 Mb/s DSL.

See http://www.stadsnat.karlstad.se/

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Geek of Tech]

>My (aging) PATA based system can't even handle 2MB off the internet, which I can get from a couple websites that just so happen to be hosted at the same site my employeer peers at. 40Gb? Disk platters would fly out of the case.

In other news, a 75 year old woman was killed earlier today when the disk platters from her computer's hard drive flew out of the case, proceeding through her, and her little dog too. Many analysts expect the grieving family to sue Google, the owners of the interwebernet, for the emotional grief caused by the blazing download rates.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[autophile]

At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds she is the PirateBay. Now that's who he should have given the connection to.

So that PB could what? Serve kilobyte torrent index files in a few microseconds?

--Rob

Re:Great publicity stunt

[BUL2294]

what's another 37 gonna do?

Check your math... It's not "another 37", but "another ~39,997"... (Yes, I know I'm ignoring the whole kibi, gibi, shibby thing...)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Go4Linux]

Running Windows is she? Some script-kiddie please hack that box and turn it into a zombie fileserver. Question remains whether that connection is symmetric.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

the signal to noise ratio on your posts is way too low. shut up.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Lord_Sintra]

Imagine DoSing someone with a connection like that. Or if you could get half a dozen of them into a botnet....

Re:Great publicity stunt

[sYkSh0n3]

doh! your right, you'd think i'd be more awake at 2 in the afternoon.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[walt-sjc]

In rural areas, copper is cheaper

I think the POINT of this article is that it may not be for long. Keep in mind that fiber prices are coming down and the price of copper is going up. Existing fiber and copper have relatively short length limits before repeaters too. With current tech, they have to have remote terminals / DLC's etc. all over the place to extend the reach of the CO. This new fiber tech can go 2000km without a repeater. That's huge! That shitcans all the "in the middle" equipment so it could be just the CO and the premise (house, business.) Now in reality, they will keep a bunch of that remote equipment so they can reduce the number of fiber lines from the CO and tree out, but the old existing limits of unrepeated fiber and copper are effectively a non-issue with the new tech.

So yeah, right now, today, copper is cheaper, but copper can't do what fiber can do so it's a moot point anyway. If you want 1/10th the speed of fiber, it's still going to cost you 10 times more to do it in copper right now (talking last mile here...) If that cheap.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, Ethiopia is where you'd have to be now to only have 384/1.5. With basic 1Mb/10Mb costing pennies who would have such a dismal service?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[FuzzyDaddy]

(256 bits sent as a single signal)

256 QAM means 256 symbols, or 8 bits per symbol. So you'd need about 5 GHz bandwidth.

You need the entire radio spectrum to transmit 10 channels at this speed.

There's a lot of spectrum. There's a recently been a new band opened up (71-76 and 81-86 GHz), which supports 10 Gbps full duplex (see, for example, http://www.gigabeam.com/productFamily.cfm).

40 Gbps is still a bit much at this point, but it's not out of the question.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[walt-sjc]

I dunno, Ethiopia is where you'd have to be now to only have 384/1.5. With basic 1Mb/10Mb costing pennies who would have such a dismal service?

I had a house in San Jose, CA (silicon valley) where I couldn't get cablemodem service, was too far for ADSL, and could only get IDSL (144kb/144kb) for $140 / month as my ONLY "better than dial-up" service. I was less than 5 minutes down the road from Ebay's corp. headquarters. That was 3 years ago and I think that house can now get cablemodem, but it still can't get high-speed DSL.

PacBell, SBC, AT&T, or whatever they want to call themselves this week SUCKS.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot to say that she can only experience 10MBps of data because she is using a lame PC. What a waste of bandwith!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[brucmack]

Well, here in Denmark, the electric utilities have been laying down fiber everywhere. Several locations can now get a fiber connection that doesn't even bind them to any service providers (right now, there are 5 internet & VoIP providers and two TV providers). Internet speeds are up to 25/25 Mbps, and the TV packages are equivalent to cable and satellite.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mikkelm]

The point of this article is absolutely nothing. "Look, we can put more capacity than any personal computer will be able to handle for at the very least a full decade into a single home". Great. It means absolutely nothing.

Copper is easy because copper can be carried above ground, and the infrastructure is already in place in rural areas. Pulling new copper above ground is also relatively cheap. Fibre does -not- like exposure to the elements, and it most certainly does NOT like hanging around in the air. Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.

In urban areas, fibre is a feasible solution as it is able to use existing city infrastructure to get where it needs to go in most places, and even where it can't, digging over relatively short distances isn't that much of a problem. If you were to do fibre to the home in rural areas, you would need HUGE digging projects to set up lines that would NEVER generate ANY profit no matter how much you charged for your service. Even then, this 2000 kilometre distance is absolutely meaningless as you would still need to create a hierarchical network with local access layer facilities in lieu of traditional copper COs connecting to regional distribution points feeding into a core network. The cost of building a rural fibre to the home infrastructure will probably never become feasible. Ever.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[whopub]

So that PB could what? Serve kilobyte torrent index files in a few microseconds? At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds a torrent index file would arrive at least 5 seconds *before* you initiated the download!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[hcdejong]

At 70 GHz+ you're talking about line-of-sight links. That solves one problem, but causes others. And at those frequencies, things like rain will interfere with the link.

There's a lot of spectrum.

But you'll notice that commercial applications above 2 GHz are rare. Above that, you've got microwave links, but those are not consumer-level technology. Gigabeam is basically an attempt at downscaling/making cheaper microwave links.
The Gigabeam site doesn't mention pricing of their product, but engineering for these frequencies isn't easy. The validity of their claims (cheaper than installing fibre) remains to be seen.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Fred Ferrigno]

Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX [wikipedia.org] and UMTS Rev 8 [wikipedia.org] are at least an option worth considering as a solution to the "last mile" problem? All Cisco cares about is bandwidth. The more bandwidth used, the greater the strain on the network infrastructure, the more routers and switches you need to support it all. If WiMAX could do 40Gbps to the home (each home), they'd probably be more interested in it.

Complaining about the use of "radio" is a pretty low blow, considering English isn't this guy's native language. Hell, he was talking to a Swedish newspaper, so it's possible that's just how the newspaper translated it into English.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[dualityshift]

Your disclaimer nullifies the rest of your post. Your original post harped on the fact the article cites that installing Windows was the most difficult part of the process. Your post gives an air of surprise. How is it surprising when enterprising individuals do what they can to cut costs? Your other points may possess a certain validity, however, bringing up the Windows issue as your main gripe weakens your other points.

I do like how you've overcompensated for your Net envy by blurting out a 'very' braggish description of your so-called net connection.

I find it fascinating how people, such as yourself, can bash something new and innovative when they use an off-the-wall method of displaying their innovation. Tell us, how have you contributed to bringing a faster, more reliable internet?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[A nonymous Coward]

Yeh, but it's SWEDISH granny porn.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck off. thanks.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[walt-sjc]

Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.

Someone may want to tell Verizon, Pacbell (now AT&T), and all the other telcos that because they have aerial fiber all over the place. So sorry, you are wrong. I have fiber out on the pole in front of my house. It's all over this town. I agree that it is most protected in the ground, but it CAN and IS being strung aerially all over the world.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[ktappe]

Is it any surprise that Cisco is dismissing "radio" as "old fashioned" (nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless"), when high-bandwidth wireless technologies like WiMAX and UMTS Rev 8 are at least an option worth considering?

Indeed. Electricity and light are older than radio, but I notice Cisco is still using those for their hardwired connections.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[C0rinthian]

Granny sucked it all down her pipe. I never want to see/hear that sentence again. Ever.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Teun]

In Europe overhead lines are even in rural places a rare exception.
So in Europe the feasibility/cost of copper vs. fibre is not influenced by digging.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mikkelm]

Some ISPs may decide to risk hanging last mile fibre in the air. A completely stupid idea, but that's their choice. The thing is, we aren't talking last mile neighbourhood connections here. We're talking rural infrastructures. There is a HUGE difference.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Copper is easy because copper can be carried above ground, and the infrastructure is already in place in rural areas. Pulling new copper above ground is also relatively cheap. Fibre does -not- like exposure to the elements, and it most certainly does NOT like hanging around in the air. Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.

Are you sure of this? I always head Japan was ahead in terms of fiber to the home because they could cheaply put fiber on the existing above-ground lines (telephone poles).

related to that, I also remember seeings a demonstration of new Japanese fiber that could be bent, and even knotted without problems. (not sure if it was in production, or still in the lab)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Fordiman]

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.

Doubtful. (Why even say this? To impress upon people that a high bandwidth connection isn't "hard" to use? Wouldn't the new computer she ostensibly got, since, as the article notes, she's never owned a computer in her life, have come with Windows installed?[1])"

Ah, you're missing something. If she's got a 40Gb connection, chances are that the PC is custom-built to be able to handle that kind of data flow. PCI-E parts, a fibre net card with custom modulation (thanks, Cisco), very likely a metric fuck ton of RAM and a block-striped SATA RAID-0 are all things I would guess would need to be in it to take full advantage of that 40Gb (about 5GByte/s) connection.

My guess is that it was built from parts, and was a pain in the nuts to both install Windows and get all the drivers for the newer hardware running properly.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mikkelm]

As commented on earlier, if an ISP is willing to deal with the many issues that will inevitably arise from arial fibre, doing so on a building-to-building or access layer switch-to-neighbourhood basis, they can do that, but the GP was talking about the things that a 2000 kilometre range on fibre connections would enable in rural areas, and you do not hang even 5 kilometres of fibre in the air if you have any sort of sanity, let alone hundreds of kilometres. Add to that the need to draw long fibre strands to feed one or two homes in rural areas, and the cost gets way too prohibitive.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[scolbert]

Your comments are right on. Yea, like its harder to install almost any version of Windows vs. any single router. Nice point of the use of the word "radio".

Do 75 year old women surf the net for porn? If so, she might have her first application for her high-bandwidth connection! LOL!

Sammy at IT / Personafile

Re:Great publicity stunt

[tantaliz3]

As soon as it becomes marketably viable, there will be more than a few competitors. Which will bring prices down in a hurry.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Ironsides]

Easy to DoS someone like that. All you need to do is clog up the narrowest pipe between the internet and the computer. I doubt the entire infrastructure of the company allows 40Gbps between the public internet and her. More likely, there is a bottleneck somewhere that we could choke.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[shaitand]

nah, you'd just put them in all the same box. That data still has to be stored somewhere.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[porpnorber]

The various comments here have caught what I expect is both halves of the point without connecting in the middle. A home PC you buy from Dell cannot drink from the 40Gbps hose. Not under Linux, definitely not under Windows. So ... no, whatever she is running, if it can do this thing then it is not going to be shipped preconfigured as a home computer. And, even if it were, there would be the little question of the drivers for the NIC, which I seriously doubt are part of the Windows distro.

So they keep that last .5/5. I truly believe, based on my own real world experience at the 10Gbps mark, that the Windows install was the hardest part!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[phreeza]

cat /dev/urandom | nc fast.granny.se 1100

and

nc -l -p 1100 > /dev/null

if you really want to use the bandwidth, no need for harddrives, etc ;)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people pay a flat rate for GPRS, just like Internet access.

No one pays flat-rate for GPRS.

Some operators provide a certain allowance (in the UK this is ~40MB a day) into their mobile contracts, but they don't have anything approaching the infrastructure to provide true flat-rate GPRS service to even a fraction of their subscribers.

Worse still is the fact that mobile operators have paid a FORTUNE for 3G licences and they're desperate to try and recoup their costs. Of course trying to entice wide-usage of data services via flat rate would seem like a good idea, but no operator (in the UK at least) is providing flat-rate service - they don't have the cojones.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, secret lutefisk recipes... http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/ic/lutefisk.ht ml

Re:Great publicity stunt

[DamnStupidElf]

So, absolutely for any realistic home use, the throughput in the article is useless, since no media has currently ludicrous requirements where 4 GB of data per second can be consumed and discarded per second, and storage becomes the bottleneck for downloading. There exist applications that can benefit from transferring that much data over a network, crunching on it and being done with 4 GB datasets in a second, but they are few and far between and none really applicable for a home computer.

Spam filter?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you understand "bandwidth"? High speed pipes allows us to do more things simultaneously, not necessarily one thing faster.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Rain (and especially wind) already interferes with 802.11. Stupid ionized wind.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Chris Kamel]

Get rid of all of these hard drives.
And not be able to do anything whatsoever with your computer when you're away from a cable?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

This also goes some way to explaining why HDTV is a bit of a con, especially if you're using a dish rather than cable. Firstly, if you broadcast HDTV at the same bandwidth as normal TV, even with mpeg-4, it looks worse, because the artifacts are more visible. So you could use more bandwidth for a nicer looking channel? Yep.. at cost.. What are you talking about? Within the 6MHz analog tv channel, you can fit at least 4 digital broadcasts of much higher quality, and that's just plain DTV. An HDTV signal, plus some extra, can fit within that same 6MHz band. I don't know where you came up with the idea that compressed digital HDTV signals look worse than analog tv either. The few times an HDTV signal does look bad is if your provider re-compresses it on the fly to save even more bandwidth (ala sat providers and some cable) or if you have a weak or multi-path'd broadcast signal from a tv tower.

Gov propaganda
http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#whatishighd efinition

and

http://www.itvdictionary.com/hdtv.html

to provide a few

Re:Great publicity stunt

[jjrockman]

Doubtful. (Why even say this? To impress upon people that a high bandwidth connection isn't "hard" to use? Wouldn't the new computer she ostensibly got, since, as the article notes, she's never owned a computer in her life, have come with Windows installed?[1]) Because sir, Windows bashing guarantees a spot on slashdot!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[walt-sjc]

Rural infrastructure (backbones) isn't an issue NOW. We already have TONS of infrastructure fiber. Damn near every town over pop 200 has fiber. The issue is the last mile. This article is about the last mile. The FA is not about stringing 40Gb fiber from New York to Chicago, it's about lighting up granny's house. It's totally reasonable to be stringing fiber 5km aerially to get to the farm house. The cable cost really isn't the issue - it's the costs if installing ANYTHING. The old copper is already there therefore it is cheap to use.

You may think it's a stupid idea, but they have specially made aerial fiber cable. It has been designed and tested to last many many many years in this application. They can string 100 miles of fiber aerially for the cost of trenching 1. The cost of fixing it when it breaks is factored in. It's still a much cheaper and faster way of getting fiber service to the last mile anywhere.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[suggsjc]

Try copying a 30GB file between 2 PCs with GiGE on the same LAN (or even 2 HDDs on the same computer). If it takes 2 seconds, I will pay for your FTTH installation. How long is that bet good for? I'm sure that something will come along and make this possible, and probably sooner rather than later. Anyway, to make a somewhat relevant post, yes this was clearly a publicity stunt plain and simple. However, anyone that thinks it "stupid" to have a 40Gbps connection to their home is "stupid" themselves. It may not be cost effective or there be anything that can actually accept data at that rate (at least not sustained). But (a stretch, i know) this is somewhat like an early adopter scenario. Early adopters pay premiums for the marginal benefits of the latest & greatest. However, they help drive down the costs as the technologies become more mainstream (and thus cost effective). Ok, so this lady didn't actually pay for this and you probably can't actually even be an early adopter of this tech yet, but my point is that putting it out there (and raising awareness) is a good thing.

Bottom line, just because its overkill doesn't mean its useless (at least in the long run).

Re:Great publicity stunt

[netcrusher88]

Many people pay a flat rate for GPRS, just like Internet access.

You could say that, and I know for a fact the cell phone companies do as well, and they're full of shit. No offense - one would normally assume that an "unlimited" data plan does in fact mean unlimited (and does with some carriers and some plans - the ~$50 ones for Verizon's EVDO PCMCIA cards for example). Your standard ~$20/mo "unlimited" data plan is (on AT&T) capped at 6 MB. After that, you pay the same 1c/kB as everyone else. I'm sure you'd find similar restrictions in the small print on data plans for all carriers.

The normal charge - barring a limited plan that provides a discount for purchasing x bandwidth - is one cent per kilobyte on AT&T. That is in fact charging per packet, or group thereof. I'm not familiar with GPRS standards so I don't know how big a packet is/can be. Note that, as I stated above, this charge still applies when you exceed the limit on your flat-rate "unlimited" plan.

Anyway, my point here is don't knock it because there are exceptions. A lot of upper-end Internet connections charge by the packet, or rather group thereof, as well.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Afecks]

4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])
I'm not sure where you buy your PCs from but every brand new PC I have purchased does have the Windows setup files already copied to the hard drive (typically from a PE builder) but you do actually have to complete the install by specifying the time zone, computer name, administrator password, automatic updates and whatever crap the OEM tacked on. I'm pretty sure that is what they were talking about. If you want to nitpick prepare for the same treatment.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[jack455]

even with all that bandwidth, wouldn't latency still be a significant problem when burning ISOs?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is AT&T capped at 6MB/month for data on unlimited plans? I've been a Cingular (now AT&T) subscriber for 3+ years and use at least 50MB/month in email & web browsing on my smartphones, occasionally even tethered to a laptop. I have never been charged anything more than the $20/month fee for the unlimited GPRS/EDGE add-on, nor have I ever read about anyone actually being over-charged for 'too much unlimited data' (unless there was a problem when their plan was provisioned, which can happen).

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Eravnrekaree]

Actually fiber optics are a good idea. The bandwidth potential is actually significantly greater than wireless. People act as though wireless is infinite, this is just ignorant. Wireless real estate is actually very limited, you only have a certain number of frequencies between 300 khz and a few gigahertz and all of these different services that want to use it and are fighting over it. Ham radio services for instance are always in jeopardy due to the increasing commercial demands for bandwidth. Being a ham radio operator i know this. Furthermore, your wireless signal and usage consumes its frequency segment within a 200 foot or so sphere, while the signal on a cable stays in the cable, and only occupies the space inside of it, so it is much more efficient as many cables can be run to increase bandwidth to levels far exceeding anything imaginable with wireless. Wireless is a joke and will never bring the high bandwidth high reliability connections you want. As well, I do think there are health issues regarding the high frequency wifi signals. I am not kidding about this, I feel nauseated when I am too near a wifi hub, I have to stay at least 20 feet away from them. So fiber gives us far greater capacity, hundreds or thousands times greater, more safely and reliably. I want a 40 gbps fiber connection into my house a thousand channels.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Dahamma]

No one pays flat-rate for GPRS.

Some operators provide a certain allowance (in the UK this is ~40MB a day) into their mobile contracts, but they don't have anything approaching the infrastructure to provide true flat-rate GPRS service to even a fraction of their subscribers.

I pay $20 a month for unlimited data over GPRS (EDGE, in fact, which is based on GPRS). You can argue that the carriers are oversubscribing their GPRS networks, or that if I somehow abused that unlimited plan I would be warned/etc for that abuse, but you can't say I don't pay flat rate. $20. Doesn't change. FLAT.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Eivind]

The last mile ain't that tricky in densily populated areas. My neighbourhood just installed fiber-to-the-home to everyone (=aprox 200 houses) complete from the bottom up, starting by digging. Cost ? Sligthly over $100K, aproximately $500/house. That is not cost-prohibitive at all. True, currently we've only installed 1Gbps tranceivers and switching-gear, but changing that stuff is relatively cheap anyway since it doesn't require digging. (also doesn't require changing cabling, the physical fibre is tested to 100Gbps) We don't use it really, aprox 20 Mbps for streaming TV, 1Mbps reserved (overkill, but what the hell) for voice-over-ip and a choice of 10, 25 or 50 Mbps internet. (symetrical)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[timeOday]

even with all that bandwidth, wouldn't latency still be a significant problem when burning ISOs?

Optical burners aren't all that fast, so there's no problem putting a sufficient write buffer in main memory. Anyways, that assumes you would want to burn an iso in the first place. In a truly network-based system, I'd think the need for that is greatly reduced. There is the issue of important information like family photos, but centralized and managed storage would already be much more reliable than what most people are doing now.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Dahamma]

Exactly! Why is everyone posting this bullshit that is just WRONG!? If I was charged more for going beyond 6MB/month I think:

1) it would have been in my contract, and

2) I would have a lot higher phone bills...

Besides, the iPhone is using AT&T EDGE, and is going to cause a LOT more than 6MB a month usage for a lot more casual users. Unfortunately, I'm guessing this is going to hammer their network. But they are NOT charging extra for usage over 6MB.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[leenks]

It depends where in Europe. In the UK there are millions of overhead lines.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Dahamma]

The bet is good until HDDs can handle 15GB/s :) I'll start worrying when they perfect the 1,000,000RPM spindle. If we ever get to 15GB/s storage it'll have to be some solid state/holographic/whatever storage. Not to mention the network I/F, processor, etc.

Anyway, OF COURSE I am not saying it's USELESS. I'd LOVE to have said theoretical 40Gbps to my home, because then at least I'd be guaranteed that my last mile of Internet access won't be the bottleneck. It would be one of the 100 other bottlenecks on both ends that can't handle that rate.

Let's focus on getting 40Mbps to 1000 homes before worrying about 40Gbps to 1 home.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[HaMMeReD3]

Well, hopefully she'll become a seeder, and the kinda that doesnt even know what seeding is and leaves the setting at unlimitted.

Seriously though, isn't this network connection faster then the speed of the ram in her computer?????

What drive is going to keep up with it?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[tumbleweedsi]

She is able to "enjoy" nothing on her connection except the same internet to which we all have access. Sure, you can argue that as such bandwidth penetration becomes commonplace, services will be built to support it - like HD movie downloads or live HD IPTV. But as of now, this is nothing more than a technology demonstration, even though the article lamely begs to differ ("This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.")

Actually when broadband first took over from dialup it was a problem for many sites who did not have the bandwidth to support users coming in at 512kb. If I was buying a 40Gb line to my ISP I would expect them to at least be selling me some additional services or providing some pretty awesome mirror/edge caching services. My current ISP does a lot of mirroring so often when I download stuff I get it at the full speed of my line with no contention because I am not going off my ISP's network.

As for the Windows crack, I expect that was a ploy to get linux fanboys to post it on /. and then discuss it... but it seems everyone was too clever for that. ;-)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[humdai]

But a little dangerous, how long till it is a spam zombie?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[glitch23]

Last mile fibre to the home is no more difficult than establishing copper to the home in a typical urban environment.

Maybe in the UK the media is "fibre" but in the US the media is "fiber" and the protocol used by some SANs is "fibre" channel.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[FuzzyDaddy]

Yes, it's line of sight... I thought we were talking about linking a house to the internet. Line of sight is fine for that.

Gigabeam is trying to make higher bandwidth links that can be used with high density. They're also bleeding money like nobody's business. The problem's not the technological difficulty so much as the lack of a market. There's commercial products at 12.5 GHz (DirecTV). Granted, it's not 73 GHz, but it's in the arena where similar manufacturing and design techniques are used. There are amplifiers and mixers available for these frequencies.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[cmburns69]

I find it interesting that you bring this up. Some of my favorite sci-fi books are Enders Game, and its sequels. Originally released in 1985, the series has shown interesting longevity in predicting computing developments:

1. A world wide network, linking (almost) all computers and providing forums and news in real-time.
2. Said network becoming detached from disks due to their inherent speed limitations; All needed programs and data are pulled from and stored to "the network" as needed.
3. A sentient being evolving from the interconnecting computers.

We're well on our way to #1, we can now see #2 on the horizon. How long until #3 happens?

(Ok, I'm not sure #2 or #3 will happen or be practical, but it's fun to imagine)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[xbmodder]

Obviously I can't transfer 30 GB over 1 Gbit/sec. Basic math (30 Gbyte)*8=240 Gbit 240 gbit/1 gbit sec #Cancel units 240 sec MINIMUM. More time because ethernet overhead, etc.. Anyways, pay for my 40 Gbyte/sec connection, or put the money in a bank, I can get FTTH for only, like 30k. I live in silicon valley. Yes, this is a marketing stunt. No, there is no point in this technology. No, this technology doesn't actually work. Yes, if you had the right stuff you could transfer 30 Gbyte in 2 seconds. Pay me and I'll show you! Also, what distance is it going over? Can't break those damn laws of physics. PS: I would assume that they built this computer themselves.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mcpkaaos]

That data still has to be stored somewhere.

Not really. If everyone had that kind of bandwidth you could just keep all of your data on the network at all times. Many a clever programmer can attest to using a network for temporary storage. With effectively infinite bandwidth, it no longer needs to be temporary.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[sxeraverx]

On the other hand, when your network is faster than your disk, the only things worth storing locally are things that need fast random access to (latency is still going to be bigger over the network than the disk). This is a great scheme to cripple p2p! Finally, everyone's connection will be so fast that no one will have to store anything locally, so no one will share!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What if the remote site goes down? There comes a point that finding it on the web may become not worth the time, you might just store a local copy if you think you ever want to see a certain file again.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mikiN]

While you're at it, why not use the Earth as a giant supercomputer? Come to think of it, this may explain this wild fascination with the number 42, the ultimate question, rumors about mice running the whole show etcetera.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. The data (physically) has to be somewhere. even with 5GB/sec bandwidth, you couldn't store much useable data "on the wire" regardless of how big your packet size is in modern terms unless ram suddenly is a lot cheaper than hard drives. With fibre, the data travels a bit quick, so it can't be stored for more than a few seconds or so (assuming you have set up one hell of a complex fibre network with routers passing the data between each other, each with *gobs* of memory). Most people (well, most nerds) would set up a master server in their house, and use diskless client machines. Makes managing systems easy.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Xabraxas]

At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds she is the PirateBay

The article is wrong. It would take more like 10 - 15 seconds on a connection of that speed. That's still incredibly fast but also incredibly unlikely.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[turing_m]

At least she can download and try every single linux and BSD distribution hosted at her ISP, for free, in the space of a day. If they offer that service.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[armareum]

When the GP said "Imagine DoSing someone with a connection like that", I understood it as "Imagine DoSing someone using a connection like that".

Re:Great publicity stunt

[CasaVacas]

Seed Woman, SEEEED!!!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 20Mbps over fiber into my home, and as you move geographically away, it rapidly becomes impossible for any server to fill that pipe. The network in between is just not up to it. Bandwidth tests from California seldom exceed 16Mbps. Locally they peg it at 20Mbps reliably.

The one way I do know to fill the pipe reliably is to download Linux .iso files from different mirrors simultaneously. Seven pipes each running at 2Mbps loads those images pretty quick, and still leaves room for streaming porn!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[drachenstern]

I believe you are referring to the next "movement" in IT/CS/whatever-we-call-it-nowadays

This is the goal of such programs as Microsoft's Live and the ever vaporous GoogleOS. One server (okay, a cluster, that you see as a single server, such as http: / / www. google .com) storing all your data and everyone else's with all of the programs being updated in a central location and you only cache the bits of the program that you're actually running.

Ever lose a connection to GMail? Ever pay attention to your name on the quicklist on the left? Try disabling your wireless sometime to see the effect.

Yes, sure, all the big websites have this functionality for web pages, but think of Linden Labs releasing a client that could run without Windows/Linux/MacOS/Java/Whatever, natively, over some sort of "Ma Bell" 'bootp/PXE' service, on whatever platform you want.

That's the future of Microsoft Live, and that's the future of computing.

It's coming, and I can't wait to see the gloriousness that will be...

SkyNet (okay, not really, but probably)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[StikyPad]

Me too, although it's $50 here. They don't even offer metered usage.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[qbwiz]

With 5 GB/s, you can only really store 333 MB around the radius of the earth. Unless you manage to convince the routers to do crazy things, you can't really do very much with that.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[scottv67]

Tell us, how have you contributed to bringing a faster, more reliable internet?

I smiled when I read this part of your post. You may want to research who Dave Schroeder is and what he's contributed to network monitoring/network management before you start taking jabs at him.

-Scott, Fellow Cheesehead

Re:Great publicity stunt

[The One and Only]

There was a day when a post like yours would have gotten an AC response in the style of the old "story of the homosexual gang rape of CmdrTaco" trolls.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you think. The recipe's encrypted using 32MB Blowfish.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still confused. Who is using the fat pipe, you or him?
A: Yes.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Dahamma]

Well, mine is AT&T so you get what you pay for :) (didn't that used to be a POSITIVE when mentioning AT&T!?!)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Bonobo_Unknown]

I thought he might have been referring to if there is interference with the signal. In analogue TV you just get a bit of static across the screen, with HDTV whole areas block up and become non viewable for a period of some seconds.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[complete loony]

I highly doubt the PC could cope with anything like that kind of bandwidth. The bus to the network card and hard disk would be a major bottleneck. She'd be lucky to get 700Mbit/s.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[digitalchinky]

(nice choice of calling it "radio" instead of "wireless")

I don't get your point, 'wireless' by definition is using the electromagnetic spectrum, or some other medium able to propagate a signal. In the case of wireless networks, they are using bog standard transmission techniques that can be found right throughout the satellite world, as well as in many terrestrial microwave links.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[mgblst]

Wow, could you really be the biggest wanker in the world? How the fuck did you get marked up so high.

So what if they walked on the moon, it is no good to us until we build a moonbase, and have an easy passage for the rest of us to the moon. This isn't news at all.

So yes, they should never announce anything new, until everything is in place for you to watch 100s of HD channels.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Askmum]

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.

Doubtful.

Agreed. The most difficult part of the project is to utilise this 40Gbps link. In order to do so, you would need some serious hardware on the receiving end (filestorage at 40Gbps is no trivial task) or actually attach 1500 screens to your PC so you can actually watch those 1500 HDTV channels (maybe that's why it's so hard to install Windows. That's just not Intel hardware ;) )

And of course, you need some serious hardware on the sending end. 40Gbps routers. Yeah, commonplace where I work...

Re:Great publicity stunt

[sqldr]

I didn't say compressed digital tv looks worse than analogue, I said that compressed mpeg-4 hdtv looks worse than compressed mpeg-2 non-HD tv. As for the paying for bandwidth - I work with a broadcaster. 6mhz is easily enough for a high quality HDTV signal. Unfortunately, your average european satellite is dishing out close to 1000 channels if you include all the multi-start stuff. You don't GET 6mhz unless you pay for it. You get something closer to 2mhz.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Jesus_666]

Remember, we're talking about Europe here. Over here "rural" means "more than thirty kilometers from the next big city". Also, we usually have the last mile undergound anyway, so hanging fiber is not an issue.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Jesus_666]

Well, the UK didn't really want to be associated with continental Europe for a long time...

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Qzukk]

I did read your post. Those services exist now and have been at the heart of the entire network neutrality debate that has been going on for some time.

Sure, 40Gbps is a publicity stunt, and sure, if it became everyday then people would use it, but the set-top video players, voip telephones, and everything else required for a non-stunt internet connection all exist now.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[inKubus]

At 1 HD-DVD every 2 seconds a torrent index file would arrive at least 5 seconds *before* you initiated the download!

What is this, Soviet Russia?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

through my tweaked cable modem I do enjoy downloading things at 1.5 megaBYTES, not bits, per second(yes that is 1,500kilobytes per second). Granted, I only receive these speeds from newsgroups usually, torrents don't go as fast obviously cause it's based on the people uploading. She will never be able to download at the amount this article suggest because WHERE is she gonna get it from? I doubt she even knows how to use newsleecher

Re:Great publicity stunt

[iNetRunner]

because to provide a complete service in London alone would involve putting a mast on every single street corner.

There are already cameras on every corner, I'm sure they can handle antennas as well...

Well, putting a mast in every corner would mean that there would probably be a fibre channel there too.. And then it might be easier to get one to your home too.. ;)

Re:Great publicity stunt

[leenks]

Many (most?) UK citizens still don't want to be associated with continental Europe, despite what the government says.

Regardless, I don't see what relevance your statement has here - how about France, Germany, or Sweden instead?

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Jesus_666]

Don't confuse those with telecommunications lines! What your pictures show are the overland lines that form the long-range backbones of the electric grid. Those have nothing to do with the last mile or (usually) telecommunication - they end in transformation facilities outside the town; the individual houses are connected underground. Phone and fiber lines are underground as well. There still are a couple laat-mile phone masts in some exceptionally backwater places, but (at least in Germany) they are quickly dying out. I, personally, haven't seen one since the early nineties.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

In the early years, computers were hugely expensive and sharing a mainframe was common. In the future, "infinite" bandwidth and "reliable" network security will likely re-promote the use of terminals rather than PCs with their own disks. Storing data remotely will be cheaper, more secure, and more convenient. e.g., how easily can Grandma access [and backup] her PC's hard-drive from her phone while vacationing in France? If the data's on the net via an account and secure broadband connectivity, all you need is CPU, I/O, and RAM.

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, torrent download YOU!

Re:Great publicity stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody bothered to measure what Granny's (Human, download) bandwidth is? Any AI researchers out there care to enlighten us?

Yes, but the real qustion

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Are there any servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels simultaneously?

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Selfbain]

And how exactly is her computer going to process that much information fast enough to keep up.

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this grandma can now. Well, probably not using Windows, but if she set up a proper server...

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Cygnostik]

I don't think that's quite the point. :-)

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[LordSnooty]

Are there any servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels simultaneously?

Maybe the real question is, does she have 1,500 TVs on which she can simultaneously watch these programmes?

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Anonymous Coward]

How about 1 HDTV stream apiece from 1500 servers?

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Geek of Tech]

Well, there is the one that Ms. Löthberg is running...

Now as long as she doesn't become a spammer we're all okay...

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[ruiner13]

With distributed serving, the real question is how many host servers will it take to support one person streaming. The days of needing a single big-iron server to host a download is thankfully over, if the user chooses.

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels simultaneously?

If Slashdot didn't have the bandwidth, who would?

Re:Yes, but the real qustion

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The Sun Streaming System can do 320 gigabits per second and up to 160,000 simultaneous streams (although those are 2Mbps streams -- HD requires 8Mbps, so that's only 40,000 concurrent HD streams).

Here it comes...

[Anonymous Coward]

"RIAA arrests 75 year old woman in sweden for file-sharing over her 40GBPS connection. Damages are estimated in the billions."

Re:Here it comes...

[Anonymous Coward]

"RIAA arrests 75 year old woman in sweden for file-sharing over her 40GBPS connection. Damages are estimated in the billions."

Wow! first news of the first 40Gigabit/sec residential internet connection, and now just two minutes later this "Anonymous Coward" brings news of a 40GigaByte/sec residential connection. this is amazing!

Re:Here it comes...

[Forge]

Gotta love Slashdot.

But seriously. Can you imagine seeding on this link while all your peers are on similar bandwidth? How long would it take to download the full run of any popular series (5 to 10 seasons)?

Somebody stop me... Please... I can't help it.

How much is that in Libraries of Congress per blink of a human eye?

There. I can breath again.

Re:Here it comes...

[MattHaffner]

Gives a new meaning to DPS...

Re:Here it comes...

[drachenstern]

Screw LoCs/BoEs

I want to know how many rods/hogsheads

There, I said it, now how many posts does it take to correct this one ;)

mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools*

[JazzyJ]

Screw the botnets... I think the spammers just found their next zombie target!

Re:mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools*

[enjerth]

And he secretly forged a master connection.

One connection to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.

Re:mmmm...bandwidth...*homerdrools*

[Foobar of Borg]

One connection to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them.

Yyyeeesssss! We mussst get the preciousssss! [imagining having 1500 eyeballs to watch 1500 HDTV channels at once]

Why?

[Winckle]

"Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before"

Now they're just teasing us :-(

Re:Why?

[Shulai]

It's OK while she doesn't stream her strip teases for us!

Re:Why?

[slickwillie]

She's been waiting 75 years for a connection fast enough.

Huh.

[Junior J. Junior III]

Talk about taking a drink from a firehose... How's her NIC keep up with that throughput? How's her hard drive? Her CPU?

Re:Huh.

[halcyon1234]

Not a problem. Her 10/100 Ethernet nic goes up to 11.

Re:Huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

She also has the most powerful botnet PC in the world now too.

Re:Huh.

[fbjon]

That's 11/111/1111/11111 Ethernet for you, mister.

Re:Huh.

[Paperweight]

Plus with that kind of bandwidth her computer will eventually become a very valuable part of some massively multihosted malware ring. Let's hope she has a quad core!

Re:Huh.

[magus_melchior]

Good point there. If she wanted true 60Gbit ( 8GByteps) speeds, she'd probably need a supercomputer with an optical NIC.

Re:Huh.

[HTH NE1]

That's 11/111/1111/11111 Ethernet for you, mister. Master of eleventy.

Re:Huh.

[Himring]

Fixodent

History Repeating

[Ckwop]

... that its all just a little bit of history repeating

It isn't just Shirley Bassey who thinks history is repeating, I do too. When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.

This lead to a collapse in price of a whole range of minerals and materials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humble cannal was the back-bone of the Industrial Revolution. It supplied cheap materials, power in the form of water wheels, and allowed production of a product to move far away from sea, yet still have global reach at the same time.

Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities. It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second.

Forget Web 2.0, AJAX or Silverlight. In a century these words will only be known by Internet Historians, who will still have no better clue that us what web 2.0 actually means ;). What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.

Simon

Re:History Repeating

[morgan_greywolf]

That's gotta be the most insightful thing I've seen posted in a comment on Slashdot -- EVAR.

Hi, you must new here! Welcome to Slashdot.

Re:History Repeating

[Bacon Bits]

Maybe I'm missing something, but how would you use a canal for a waterwheel? Canal water needs to be slow enough for a mule to pull the barge both directions. Waterwheels need the water moving fast enough to torque the wheel. That seems to be a contradiction.

Re:History Repeating

[YrWrstNtmr]

Waterwheels need the water moving fast enough to torque the wheel. That seems to be a contradiction.

Gears. If you have a large mass of water moving, it doesn't need to be moving fast.

Re:History Repeating

[Anonymous Coward]

I am trying very very hard to forget silverlight.

Re:History Repeating

[Anonymous Coward]

Now [...] information [...] can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second. This makes the Internet the fastest way to create and distribute misinformation. (emphasis mine in the above quote)

Re:History Repeating

[Tiro]

What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.

I thought the telegraph allowed this?

Re:History Repeating

[kestasjk]

Will they call this period the "information revolution" or something cheesy like that?

Re:History Repeating

[C0rinthian]

Considering how much of industry is focused on analyzing, moving, utilizing, and protecting information, it would be logical.

Re:History Repeating

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody bopple this guy. He obviously knows too much.

Re:History Repeating

[Shotgun]

Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities. It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second.

Two examples to draw your point more fully.

My wife's a real-estate agent. In years gone by, when you moved to a new town you wouldn't know where to look for houses. And if you were selling, getting the word out that yours was on the market was a lot of work. Real-estate agents had a lot of work to do. Now, a picture and a description gets dumped in the MLS. Now it's on the market. If you're buying, you look in the MLS. Easy communication has destroyed much of her value proposition as an agent, and is gutting the whole industry.

RIAA is in the same position my wife is in. Their value was in collecting artist and freeing them from having to market themselves. There was real work to do in getting the good artist presented to the public. Now they get in the way (and they damn well know it).

Many other industries are experiencing the same sort of "what'd'we do now" moments.

Re:History Repeating

[Anonymous Coward]

...What will be taught in the class-room...

If information is no longer tied to any location...what the hell is anyone doing in a class-room?

Re:History Repeating

[yellowalienbaby]

Regarding a Canal and Waterwheels.

You cannot use a canal to power a water wheel.

Canal's are static bodies of water. They have no flow.

Maybe, Maybe, you could build one on a Lock and hope it's a really busy Lock.

Quite unlikely

[lawaetf1]

download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds

Assuming she has a massive drive array to record that amount of info in two seconds. I know the statement is just to illustrate the bandwidth but the nerd in me had to point out the infeasibility of it. Preposterous!

I'll go now.

Re:Quite unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Your just bitter that it is infeasible to download HD-DVD porn in 2 seconds

Re:Quite unlikely

[teslar]

Never mind HD performance, she has to get that DvD from somewhere and I highly doubt that whoever is seeding can upload it is as fast as she can download.

Re:Quite unlikely

[HTH NE1]

So you pull from multiple seeders and you end up with the sum of their maximum seeding bandwidths.

Of course, with that much bandwidth, why bother with local storage at all? She can just stream anything she needs, and all the real storage will be at her son's place.

Re:Quite unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

She'll just load it into memory (which isn't quite fast enough either). Then, when she has to open OpenOffice.Org, Firefox, or maybe Adobe Reader, she'll have to get rid of it, but she could just l33ch it again when she remembers that she can't remember what frame number 84627 looked like.

Re:Quite unlikely

[Overzeetop]

You're just jealous. Her link is so fast, she just pipes the downloads to /dev/null, just to piss everybody else off. Old ladies can be like that, you know.

(Damn...she's not using linux. So much for that...ahh but what a bitch slap it would have been!)

Re:Quite unlikely

[evilviper]

Assuming she has a massive drive array to record that amount of info in two seconds.

Meh. That's only 10GBs of data. Her PC could potentially have more RAM than that, which certainly could store it faster than she could download it.

She could potentially write it directly from RAM to DVD-R (several minutes of course), without the data ever touching the hard drive.

Re:Quite unlikely

[Fred Ferrigno]

Congratulations, you've just independently rediscovered streaming video.

Re:Quite unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

I have tons of space in /dev/null

It never seems to fill up!

Bandwidth Enough at Last

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigbritt Löthberg connects to the network only to discover only her son's server is available, not the rest of the internet...

That's--that's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was bandwidth now. There was, was all the bandwidth I needed... ! It's not fair!

"The best laid plans of mice and men and Sigbritt Löthberg, the Swedish woman in the glasses who wanted nothing but bandwidth. Sigbritt Löthberg, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mrs. Sigbritt Löthberg in the Twilight Zone."

Re:Bandwidth Enough at Last

[ZachMG]

and pretty soon we will reach the threshold of data transmition at the the speed of light then we will be making illegal copies of it becuase it will be at both ends at the same time what will the RIAA do, either that or the world will end?

Re:Bandwidth Enough at Last

[BlueParrot]

The speed of light limits your ping, not your bandwidth. There is nothing to stop you sending data over multiple fibres or several frequencies.

Useless?

[sam_paris]

Correct me if i'm wrong but a connection of this speed is essentially useless due to the fact that the hard drive wouldn't be able to cope with such an influx of data. In addition, I imagine programs such as IE would just curl up and die if you tried to load websites at that speed.

  Call me about this again in a few years time..

Re:Useless?

[ouchiko]

Same problem with the hosting servers and about a billion other factors which make the article interesting, but pointless. I assume this service also comes with unlimited bandwidth and is not traffic shaped like pretty much every ISP out there.

Re:Useless?

[superpulpsicle]

Don't you worry. As usual comcast, verizon and other telco will figure out how to deliver this bandwidth in the year 3094. By then servers should handle it.

Re:Useless?

[UbuntuDupe]

Actually, the BIGGER problem is that if you ever try to use the full 40 Gb/s, the telco will terminate your service on the grounds that you're illegally downloading copyrighted works. :-P

Re:Useless?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had this kind of connection, why even bother with the hard drive, just write directly to the GPU's memory. 1080p straight to the framebuffer from the NIC. Actually, throw out the NIC too and put the network interconnect on the GPU.

Re:Useless?

[rob1980]

Once you factor in 2 or 3 TVs per house all receiving a different IPTV stream, a 100MB internet connection, and some small amount of additional bandwidth for telephone service, you can probably power an entire neighborhood off of that. I think this guy did it just to prove a point, but that doesn't mean everybody's going to necessarily have their own 40gbps pipe to the internet in 5 or 10 years.

Re:Useless?

[Duncan Blackthorne]

The interface speed from the NIC and system bus speed would be more limiting than that even. That's just locally, though. Her Yahoo mail account will still take 30 seconds to load :-P

what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[irw]

At the moment (call me naive) I can only see two:

• watching movies
• downloading movies

One or more content middle men industries (ie TV, DVDs) is looking at the brink of an economic revolution. There can't be any denying it now.

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[sowth]

You must be stuck in the WebTV version of the internet.

How about an interactive 3D environment with no slowdowns / weird behaviour due to latency and bandwidth limitiations? How about home users being able to be true peers on the internet (the way the network was designed to run) instead of not being allowed to run servers or worse being restricted to only the web and email--isps claiming servers and other apps use too much bandwidth. They wouldn't have this argument anymore.

In fact email was originally designed to be sent directly to your machine, not be waiting on some server until you pick it up. Instant notification. And if unix talk made a comeback, it would break the stranglehold a few companies have on IM. They require you to use their servers on their terms. With anyone able to run a talk/IM or IRC server, we have easier access and a greater freedom of choice.

I'm sure plenty of others could think of more uses for such a network...

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[HTH NE1]

At the moment (call me naive) I can only see two:

• watching movies
• downloading movies

How about monitoring the worldwide panopticon? Or maintaining multiple viewports into an on-line game?

My question is: Is that speed bi-directional, or is the uplink speed considerably slower? Imagine if it were 40 Gb/s down but only 110 b/s up!

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[cashman73]

Well,... you forgot to mention that, at that speed, you can get a whole heckuva lotta porn, and fast! Probably download every single bit of porn on the internet in one day! :-)

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[ZeroExistenZ]

What about moving virtualized datacenters?
Remote backups? (or even mirrored farms)
Imagine providing a SLA with insanely short outage-period, it would be very welcomed instead of seeing your Terrabytes slowly copy over.
Or ISPs being able to push more bandwidth through a pipe, which makes it possible to put more customers on a single pipe.

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[Fallingcow]

I didn't RTFA, but...

Fiber doesn't have the same noise and power issues that copper does. I bet it's that speed up and down.

Re:what are the uses for this speed of connection?

[cybersikh]

How about HD quality Video Conferencing at my desk?

Not that I'm looking forward to seeing the mug of some back office admin on my 1080p display.

asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[TraumaTrout]

Once she's downloaded every season of "Murder, She Wrote", will she ever use the connection again?

Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always Matlock.

Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[anotherlogan]

She can also download 50,000 recipies a second, Play 10,000 games of cribbage on Pogo, and foward 100,000 e-mails with horrible old jokes with 10 pages of fowards all at the same time.

Well, that's what my 75 year old Nan does with her internet.

Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[Starteck81]

Once she's downloaded every season of "Murder, She Wrote", will she ever use the connection again?

I think you are forgetting one important thing... The Golden Girls! ;-)

Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[mcguiver]

I am just curious if he is still living in his mother's basement? If so, that may have been the incentive to run that high of a capacity line to a 75 year old woman's house.

Re:asking on behalf of Seth Rogan...

[Garabito]

She can also e-mail old people living in Korea

Obligatory.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the beowulf cluster required to do that!!

Oh yea. I'm drooling......

Someone call the RIAA

[BlackCobra43]

Grandma who can't possibly be interested in massive copyright infringement? Check.
Ultra-high-speed connection, even if it has no bearing on its use? Check.
Foreign and not even subject to US legislature? Check.

If the RIAA want to outdo themselves in the "Really fucking bad lawsuit target" department they have the perfect target now...

Source feed

[jshriverWVU]

Wonder where he's getting his feed, it must be on a backbone or a teleco somewhere. At that speed you're probably not going to get anything near that speed from a single source. But it would be nice to download every distro of linux from different sources in a minute :)

I'd like to see this tech come into place for CAN's (City Area Networks).

Re:Source feed

[Anonymous Coward]

CAN's (City Area Networks) No need to make up your own. The more common acronym:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_area_net work

While it's neat as a tech demo

[Sycraft-fu]

This really doesn't do anything to demonstrate that fast broadband can be cost effective. Even if this single demo shows that the cost of getting it to the consumer is cheap (and it probably is reasonable, Verizion is rolling out fibre to the home) that's only half the problem. Whatever amount of bandwidth you want to offer to end users, you have to have more for your upstream to your office, and more still out to the Internet, at least if you want it to mean anything. If not, you are just putting them on a fast WAN. That's great, but not the same thing as fast broadband.

I mean in a very real way, my computer has a gigabit Internet connection. That's what it is linked at, and there's other devices it can talk to at that speed... But only very few. If it wants anything past its immediate network, it is limited to 10mbits, since that's the speed of the Internet connection. Now while my net connection really has the upstream to support that, imagine if it didn't. Suppose that the provider only had 1mbit of upstream, and it was shared among a bunch of users. Essentially my "10mbit broadband" would be useless unless I happened to be talking to someone else on their system.

In fact I've encountered broadband that is like this. I'll be transferring data to someone that claims to have 10mbit VDSL. I've no doubt they do, but their ISP lacks the bandwidth to back it up. So despite the fact that I'm at work sitting on multiple OC-3c lines and I've verified they aren't slammed, and they allegedly have a "10mbit" connection, we are getting rates more around ISDN because their ISP's upstream is slammed.

That's the "elephant in the closet" so to speak, of Internet access. I see plenty of people who tout fibre to the home and all these great technologies for lots of bandwidth on the last mile run. That's great and all, but really that's half or less of the problem. It doesn't do you any good to get a fast line to your house if there aren't even faster lines at every stage of upstream. That is not cheap, unfortunately. If you wanted to offer 40gbps to the home, I'd imagine you'd need trunks in the multi-terabit capacity going from your concentration point back to the home office and god only knows what as an actual Internet connection, at least if you wanted people to reliably be able to get a good portion of that 40gbps.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[TooMuchToDo]

The problem is the cost to an ISP to have a multi-gigabit core. Hardware for 10GBps cores is obscenely expensive (making the per-port costs high). Until the price of the hardware drops, the price of bandwidth will be held high.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[fbjon]

You're right, but this would be less of an issue with proper multicasting and things like Akamai. Just as long as there's a server cluster inside each ISP "cell" that can handle all the popular stuff, most people will be fine. I wouldn't do much with a 40Gbps connection to, say, Andorra, or any other place in particular for that matter. Intelligent distribution of content can make issues and problems with the backbone less issue-ful and problematic.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[sowth]

That is why there is a need for protocols which try to connect to the closest peer on the network. Yeah, there are plenty of situations where you need something from a specific location or an item specific to you, but there are plenty of situations where many people will have a copy of what you want. The current client/server model of doing most things also causes these hangups. Having to go from your computer to a server to your next door neighbor can be very inefficient.

Perhaps network software needs to be rethought.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[B4D BE4T]

it is limited to 10mbits

10 millibits? Per second? That's pretty slow... :P

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[DamnStupidElf]

If not, you are just putting them on a fast WAN. That's great, but not the same thing as fast broadband.

P2P works just fine on fast WANs.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[Shotgun]

I helped a compatriot set up a Squid server last year. He sets up networks for "assisted living" communities, and the old coots were always complaining that their stock updates weren't coming through fast enough. He monitored his upstream connection and concluded that 80% of the traffic was all going to a handful of sites. This make ISP caching VERY effective. $1500 for a PC with lots of hard-drives and a slew of memory, and no more complaints.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[Sycraft-fu]

You can only do so much of that. Sure, it is a great thing for popular content and hence the reason why Akamai works so well. However the great thing about the Internet is that you don't have to keep local copies of everything and, indeed, you can't due to its vast size. The reason it is such a great informational resource is rather than having to have everything, you just look it up as needed.

I'm not saying that there aren't some things out there to help, and that's part of the reason why you don't need a 1:1 bandwidth map (meaning that if you have 10 users with 100mbit each you don't need a 1000mbit upstream for that) but ultimately for the Internet to continue to be what makes it great, and to continue to grow in to new areas with more media content, we are just going to have to have some big backbones. This isn't a problem, however it means we need to be reasonable about what we expect at home.

It worries me how many people, including technical people on /. seem to think that all you do is run fibre to a house and you can have blazing fast access and that the only reason this isn't done is phone companies are evil. Publicity stunts like this certainly don't help. People just need to realise that there is a LOT involved in providing high speed access, and it takes time to build it all out, if it is to be done right.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[dlapine]

Nyah, you can get a Force 10 e1200 router with 14 slots for about $50k plus what ever the current cost per blade is, probably $100K per blade or so. They have blades with 4 10Gb ports and ones with 16 10Gb ports for a total of 224 10Gb. Check out the Eseries Routers

That's less than $10k per 10Gb port for the hardware. Given that google returns about $20K per port per month, the hardware cost is pretty inconsequential.

Then again, I'm not a network engineer, so I may be reading these price sheets incorrectly. Of course, the trick is to use dark fibre and then find some way to attach to the internet, without having to pay the $80k for the 40Gbs bandwidth you're using.

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[Deliveranc3]

ME: "Sniff Sniff"

You: "What's that?"

Me: "Dark Fiber"

Re:While it's neat as a tech demo

[fbjon]

Sure, I'm mostly thinking of high popularity content that is known to get massive hits from all over the place. Low popularity content (relatively) doesn't need to be replicated, since it's not sucking up bandwidth anyway. Youtube could be one candidate: have main servers, but if some video rises above a threshold, duplicate the .flv to local-ish caches. In this case, high customer<->ISP bandwidth can be just as valuable as customer<->Rest of Internet bandwidth.

Think of the porn..

[Lord Apathy]

I need to point this out, being /., its a requirement. But think of the porn. Gives new meaning th words "screaming pussy."

Re:Think of the porn..

[ThisIsWhyImHot]

The problem is that downloading so fast means you'd quickly download all the pr0n on the internet. Then what would I have to look forward to?

Re:Think of the porn..

[Richthofen80]

Gives new meaning th words "screaming pussy."

I might be showing my age here, but I didn't even know there was an old meaning to that phrase. What the fuck is a screaming pussy?

Re:Think of the porn..

[Lord Apathy]

Overrated my ass. That is the standard comment on slashdot when ever there is a faster link announcement. Some one always screams "think of the porn" and gets a (+3, hell yeah). Your just pissed because I beat you to it.

Errr, ok but.....

[hasbeard]

is her ISP supplying her with 40 GB of bandwidth?

Re:Errr, ok but.....

[jbeaupre]

Sure, for all of .25 seconds each month. Then she's maxed her 10 GB/mo download limit and has to wait another 30 days.

Re:Errr, ok but.....

[spacefight]

40Gbps. Makes 5 GB/s. Makes two seconds each month.

Re:Errr, ok but.....

[jbeaupre]

Good catch. I was responding to the original poster's 40 GB comment and totally forgot it was actually 40 Gb/s.

Good news for granny then. She gets to be online 8 times as long. Unfortunately with a much slower connection.

Re:Errr, ok but.....

[hasbeard]

But looking on the bright side, she can get a lot done in those two seconds. :)

Re:Errr, ok but.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It is 40G all the way to SprintLink core. And the last few hops of the link aren't oversubscribed. This really is what it looks like.

One of the use of this is

[CSHARP123]

reaching the end of internet with blazing speed

I have just three words..

[joeytmann]

Proof of concept.

Phone Number

[riffzifnab]

Anyone have her phone number? I hear she has a wonderful personality and huge "assets". I have no shame when it comes to that kind of bandwidth.

Or maybe I can just live in her basement, a change of scenery would do me good. Besides Mom is always nagging at me to get out of the basement and go see the world.

Re:Phone Number

[Dunbal]

I went outside once. It isn't worth it. Stay where you are.

Re:Phone Number

[fourharpoon]

I went outside once. It isn't worth it. Stay where you are.

Informative, ....indeed.

Re:Phone Number

[Loligo]

This is high-definition. It has better resolution than the real world.

meanwhile in Indiana

[darnoKonrad]

I only have access to 56k. Tho, that will be changing soon with the fiber coming thru this summer -- 40 bucks a month for 3Mb/s. It's insane that the United States is this far off the ball.

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[CrazyTalk]

Not the entire US - just Indiana.

(ducks)

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[roseacres]

And then there's Tennessee. I get 26.4 on a good day. I call Bellsouth/ATT and complain. The answer - 19.2 or better meets their standard. A state legislator reads my email of complaint and says that I should know that I now have the option of selecting a different phone company if I'm not happy with ATT. Sigh!

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[paulthomas]

Parts of Indiana have high speed internet. I am posting right now using a cable internet connection in Indianapolis.

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[Loligo]

Amazing.

I live in a small town (around 6,000 people) in the center of Montana. To find a city with more than 100,000 people, you have to travel at least 400 miles (leave the state, Boise is just under 700 miles by road). Our local economy is based on farms, ranches, and bars.

Yet high speed internet has been available here for at least the last 7 years.

Where in Indiana can't you get at least ISDN?

  -l

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[hidave]

You could have had Hughes Net or WildBlue satellite connections at $80/month for 1.5 Mb/s (download). I live in the boondocks and will be lucky if I EVER see faster than 1.5 Mb/s. Your fiber will be twice the speed at half the cost - don't worry, be happy!

Re:meanwhile in Indiana

[CrazyTalk]

I think the key phrase there is "parts" not "all".

Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[tjstork]

That's an absurd thing to do, as, the fastest memory speed, I believe is nowhere even close to 40gb/sec and certainly no interface bus that I'm aware for PC's that can handle a network that fast. I don't even think PCI-Express is that quick, and that's only for graphics cards isn't it?

So... unless she has some sort of a big mainframe, she can't use that speed at all.

Re:Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[Shados]

Hey thats cool, if not even PCI Express is that fast, it means Microsoft could realise one of their wet dreams, and sell Direct X "as a service"!!!!.

Re:Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[dvice_null]

> I don't even think PCI-Express is that quick, and that's only for graphics cards isn't it?

There are already network cards for PCI-Express. I suggest that find yourself a good article about PCI-Express and read it.

Re:Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[geekoid]

This is a test of this guys new modulation. So ISPs would lay this into a neighborhood and cut it up. So maybe everyone on the node gets a 100MBits.

And no PCI-Express isn't just for graphic cards.

Re:Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[DamnStupidElf]

That's an absurd thing to do, as, the fastest memory speed, I believe is nowhere even close to 40gb/sec and certainly no interface bus that I'm aware for PC's that can handle a network that fast. I don't even think PCI-Express is that quick, and that's only for graphics cards isn't it?

Hypertransport is supposed to be able to get over 8 GB/s (64gb/s) on some setups.

Re:Geez, PC's aren't even that fast!

[tjstork]

PCI Express has a maximum speed of 8GB/s, so my original point still stands. 40GB/s is way too much data for a home PC to credibly use at that kind of network speed.

Probably, but...

[RingDev]

Are there any servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels to 2 users simultaneously?

-Rick

Re:Probably, but...

[maharg]

yes. the same servers that are able to stream 1500 HDTV channels to a single user, using multicast.

Huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to be his mother.

How about remote-booting/PXE

[phorm]

I'm not entirely sure about how well it would work over the internet, but it wouldn't be that impossible to setup a remote PXE-style boot wherein the client machine has little to no operating system. For a true PXE, it would have no OS, or you could have something like a simple boot-kernel (as we use around here sometimes, grub+kernel+initrd) that boots and loads the remainder of the operating environment through the internet.

Security would be an issue, of course, but perhaps you could have something like a VPN or SSH based encapsulation of the mountpoints. As extremely high-speed internet connections become available, internet providers could offer not only internet service, but a whole operating system booted straight from the network. It would be very useful for clients that just want email, browsing, and perhaps messaging. Our systems at work support everything from basic browsing to video editing, 3d graphics apps, and streamed media. It requires a gigabit uplink between major switches and to the server, but in the future perhaps it could be doable on an internet scale.

A simple bootkernel would also be very useful for providing diagnostic/technical support. Have the client connect without a router, boot PXE, and then the ISP can run tests between the computer and their servers to see if issues have arisen from the user's PC, the internet connection/server/network, or the user's OS.

Re:How about remote-booting/PXE

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice and all sweet, but Windows is not even remotely PXEable. Of course that could also be a bless - more people adopting something better.

Sign me up!

[Random BedHead Ed]

40 Gbps? Wow, sign me up for this!

The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC

Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.

Re:Sign me up!

[DMoylan]

> Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.

tell that to the guy who can add that system to his zombie botnet spewing spam.

But at 75 ...

[crovira]

the **AAs won't be too happy that she's deaf as post and blind as a bat.

Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion

[mpapet]

is what kind of ethernet card does the system have.

True story: a guy says, "I got a 100MB connection into my office but it's slow." Go to his office test his desktop. Yup slow. (1.5mb or so) Eventually test all the way back to the adapter. Holy smoke! 100MB at the adapter.

Two problems:
1. Turns out he bought the "top of the line" Netgear switch at Best Buy.
2. Win32 NIC is configured to auto, which apparently chose the slowest possible speed.

Today's Lesson: Windows and vanilla hardware are their own impediments to fast networks.

Gee, I would think the hardest part would be:

[feepness]

Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" It seems the hardest part would be setting up the 1,500 HDTVs.

Of course if she's anything like my 71 year-old Mom it would mean she could fall asleep in from of 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously.

Re:Gee, I would think the hardest part would be:

[Jesus_666]

That's not called "falling asleep", that's called "having an epileptic seizure".

Do the math...

[Zendar]

Can someone do the math on this? Even if there were 1500 HDTV feeds, is it possible to stream them all to this lady simultaneously with a 40Gbps connection? What about the 36GB HD DVD download? 2 seconds??

Re:Do the math...

[agallagh42]

They obviously didn't do the math before writing the article. Considering that 40 Gigabits per second will get you a maximum of 5 Gigabytes per second (ignoring overhead), thats only 10GB in two seconds. That's enough for a single standard definition DVD movie in two seconds. Nowhere near enough for an HD-DVD.

Re:Do the math...

[NoOneInParticular]

They didn't say she could download 1500 dvds, it's about feeds. Not sure how much fits on a HD-DVD, but say 25GB for 90 mins. Then, for a single feed, you would roughly need 5 MB per second bandwidth. She has 5 GB, so she can with these numbers watch 1,000 feeds simultaneously. So, I would say, they did their math, their numbers are off the right order.

Re:Do the math...

[agallagh42]

I wasn't referring to the "watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously" bit, it was the "download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds" bit that I had a problem with. I stand by my assertion that their math is screwy.

Re:Do the math...

[ahem]

I don't know how you encode, but the rule of thumb for Netflix's instant viewing on PC is about 1Gb for a standard def movie.

Silicon Snake Oil

[SuperBanana]

When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.

*Long, typical blogger-eze pie-in-the-sky rant snipped*

I don't see any validity in your comparison; the article is about last-mile connectivity, and you're talking about..end-to-end delivery paths. The internet is nothing like a dedicated canal; it's a public road system.

As such, the better comparison would be as if said grandmother got a 3-lane driveway from her garage to the local street, and she's got a bicycle in the garage and bad knees. The slowest bottlenecks are the rest of the internet and her home computer; PCI busses can't push data any faster than about 200-300MB/sec, which is what, 2-3GB? Most datacenters offer 10mbit-all-you-can-eat or 100mbit billed-by-the-bit. Sure, there's faster- but it's megabucks, the stuff only major corporations can afford.

This Silicon Snake Oil. Read Cliff Stoll's book by the same title.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[billcopc]

The reason bandwidth is "billed-by-the-bit", as you put it, is because it is scarce.

The reason you think huge bandwidth to the home is unfeasible is because you're stuck in the capitalist mentality, the very monster that spawned the MAFIAA and the current US political environment. Plentiful, cheap anything is bad for business, so business steps in and makes sure that cheap thing never materializes. Bandwidth is no exception to this rule.

The telecoms have already laid thousands of miles of wires to handle phone and cable TV to every urban household. I don't see why they couldn't do it again for fiber. The reason they don't want to is because having a hyperfast digital line would make the old stuff obsolete. Why pay a separate bill for phone and cable when you can run the same data over the lone fiber line ? The telecoms are already fighting consumers over VOIP and IPTV-style streams, because they represent a direct threat to their bottom line.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[jafiwam]

I agree the "demo" is a bit off from the first potential market. But it DID get it in the news right?

So guess what, now next time I am thinking about WAN infrastructure and faced with connecting 10 locations of a printing company (which move HUGE files) I have a chance of solving the problem without 150K of equipment and services per year (which are not fast enough yet).

Imagine business parks get a "WAN LINK" building where this fiber drops to other similar buildings. You just pay for a bit of routing and the line to your office and you have a more workable solution than 40 OC3 connections.

This is a HUGE deal if you do any sort of that kind of work. Screw getting on the internet, this is about making my LAN span across 5 states transparently to the user and the admins.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[gad_zuki!]

The reason you think huge bandwidth to the home is unfeasible is because you're stuck in the capitalist mentality

As opposed to all the communist gigbit connections and computer advancements? His criticisms, if you read them, are about bus speeds mostly.

Plentiful, cheap anything is bad for business

Bullshit. Cheap plentiful computer components means cheap PCs for you and me and lots of business for Dell and HP.

Dont let the music company and teeny-bopper fans turn you off from everything every company has ever done. Unfortunatly, using the goofy mafiaa acronym means +3 insightful around here.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[geekoid]

except I can get fiber right now, should I choose to pay for it, and they will help me set up any VOIP software.
SO you are wrong. Fiber is being rolled out, I can get VOIP. Clearly you haven't bothered to understand the problem, and decided to rant against Capitalism. The same capitalism that brought you the internet, btw.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[HeroreV]

Wow, it's really amazing how incredibly wrong you are about capitalism, even after several decades of history that prove the exact opposite.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[turing_m]

"The same capitalism that brought you the internet, btw."

Ever heard of DARPA?

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[qbwiz]

DARPA brought the government and universities the internet. A corporate, capitalist ISP brought me the internet.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[The One and Only]

That may be true for restrained competition, but in competitive markets prices fall--look at the price of PC parts. With enough competition, inevitably there's someone willing to undercut the price of the cartel and steal all their business.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[The One and Only]

DARPA may have brought itself the internet, but it sure as hell didn't bring the internet to me.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[billcopc]

It's funny that you mention Dell. They just laid off about 10% of their workforce because they didn't meet their earnings forecast. Just because you're moving record units doesn't mean you're making record profits.

Bus speeds do suck, but as consumers we haven't made a case for faster buses, at least not where it matters to the manufacturers: the bottom line. It took forever to get PCI-Express into homes, because the average human doesn't know the first thing about the system bus. They just know their old gadgets don't fit in the new computer. We need a killer app.

The same applies to RAM... people used to bitch and moan about having to buy all new DDR ram back in the day, and again with DDR2. They don't see a direct correlation to real-world performance (which honestly, is quite minimal), so they have a hard time throwing money at something they can't see. I hear people every week who ask me "If I put another gig of ram, how much faster will my PC be ?" and all I can answer is "depends". People don't want fuzzy answers, they want "X dollars will get you Y more zingzangs" and most things in a PC are just theoretical limits, highly dependent on a number of variables like what other hardware you have, and what kind of user you are.

Now if we could have some neat thingy like live high-def (1080i/p) streaming TV, or some hot new game, or any other must-have feature that explicitly needs fast busses, only then will there be any sort of acknowledgment from the industry giants and mainstream adoption.

Re:Silicon Snake Oil

[billcopc]

The telecommunications industry isn't a competitive market, at least not in North America. There's nothing about a government-mandated cartel that looks anything like healthy competition. When a viable competitor comes along, the giant telecoms wag their favorite lobbyist's tail and get the government to help them squash the newcomer. We'd have cheaper telecoms if the little guys stood any chance.

I don't know very many people who look at their 300$ monthly telecom bills and say "God do I ever love my phone, cable, cell and internet providers". Gee, with a fast internet connection, I could do VoIP and IPTV and cut that bill in half. With a WiFi phone I could be down to 1/4 of the original cost, assuming this new hyperfast internet access costs no more or less than the current crappy DSL and Cable offerings. I could even offer these solutions to others, and start an IP telecom business on the cheap, but there is no way in hell I could ever have enough money to defend myself in court against a batallion of Big Bell lawyers. There is effectively no competition, because nobody can afford to play.

That's a lot of bandwidth but...

[stigmato]

How many libraries of congress can you download every second?

Re:That's a lot of bandwidth but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about 2400 libraries of congress per fortnight.

maybe thats why it was so hard to install windows.

[Brigadier]

perhaps she was running one of these ?
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/xe/

Windows?

[psbrogna]

A Windows box with a 40 gps sec connection? Great, so now 1,000 different email worms and other forms of malware on Grandma's PC have a huge pipe. I'm sure this story will end well.

Units of measure

[icydog]

can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds

I think the real question is, how many Libraries of Congress per minute can she download?

It's called OC-192

[darthcamaro]

So all they did was drop an OC-192 connection into this ladies home. woohoo. I've got OC-192 IN MY office..if i had money to burn i'm sure i could get the same provider to wire to my house too.

Re:It's called OC-192

[auroran]

Uhm actually, no.
A rough look at the speeds show it to be around OC-768 instead.
I'm also not sure if this system is sonet based or 40Gb Ethernet (4x10Gb perhaps?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Carrier

download to dev/null

[sacrilicious]

can now download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds

... and write it to where? What storage hardware is capable of writing data quickly enough to keep up?

Re:download to dev/null

[The13thSin]

Hey, if you got a insanely fast connection, you might as well have a insane amount of ram, say 10-20GB? That said, why not add 500 Gigs of flash drive... oh and 10 TB of harddrive offcourse.

Re:download to dev/null

[Raul654]

RAM. Lots of it.

Re:download to dev/null

[the eric conspiracy]

What bus controller would be able to write to RAM that fast?

Re:download to dev/null

[silas_moeckel]

Well of course she has a quad proc opteron. Actually 4GB a sec is not that hard to find to primary ram pci-e is capable of those speeds. Now you do need a serious raid array to deal with that about 50 spindles in raid 0 to deal with it.

Re:download to dev/null

[Raul654]

This one (although, strictly speaking, that's a bus controller for interprocessor communication instead of processor-RAM communication).

Re:download to dev/null

[Raul654]

Not 4 Gigabytes per second. The write up says 40.

Re:download to dev/null

[silas_moeckel]

Network speeds 40gb a sec aprox 4GB a sec notice the case it makes a difference. Networks are bits hard drives etc are bytes. Either way it's an impressive speed.

Re:download to dev/null

[rkww]

What storage hardware is capable of writing data quickly enough to keep up?

this

Re:download to dev/null

[Stu Charlton]

Well... To absolutely saturate a 40 Gbs network connection, it probably would cost $600-800k. EMC has storage arrays in this range, often for data warehousing. To be able to saturate 40 Gb, you'd probably need around 250 drives and 12 fibre channels (which could wind up being 3x quad cards). Add on another 4 to 5x 10 GigE cards configured into an 802.3ab aggregate link. All of this requires a heck of a lot of bus bandwidth and the ability ability to support 8x 8-lane PCIe I/O cards. A mid-range SMP server could probably pull it off.

This isn't that far away, however, from commodity hardware. An Apple Mac Pro with XServe RAID, for example, can support 3x PCIe slots, and 4x Seagate Barracuda internal SATA 3gb drives, which have a sustained transfer rate of 72 MB/sec each, or 2.3 Gb/sec. The XServe RAID would add another 4 Gb/sec to that. Add a 10 GigE card, and we have around 6 Gb being stored by a sub-$50k hardware solution.

Comparatively speaking...

[sopwith]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwi dths to understand why this is theoretically cool, but practically meaningless. It's like strapping a V8 engine to roller skates in hope of setting a land speed record...

Re:Comparatively speaking...

[crossmr]

tell me someone has put a video of that on youtube.

Re:Comparatively speaking...

[DamnStupidElf]

Hypertransport and PCI Express 2 have more than enough bandwidth to use it. For servers, caching content in RAM and streaming it out at 40 gb/s is not too outrageous.

the real story

[psbrogna]

Yeah, but she only gets 20 Gb/s upload speed. Damn ISP's and their fancy marketing lingo.

Re:the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

She has also already chewed thru her upload and download cap for the month in less than 1 second. Service will be disconected at the end of the month.

Re:the real story

[Crizp]

In what backwards country do you live in where you STILL have to pay per GB for broadband?

Re:the real story

[MarsDefenseMinister]

I wish I paid by the GB. My ISP charges me by the byte. If you pay in advance, they charge by the short word (2 bytes).

Re:the real story

[kramulous]

I suppose the ISP slipped in an 'Unlimited Downloads*' slogan as well. Or, was this just what I saw on Google AdSense?

* To a maximum of 5GB per month.

Re:the real story

[Mr. Roadkill]

Yeah, but she only gets 20 Gb/s upload speed. Damn ISP's and their fancy marketing lingo.

...I hope they've got port 25 outbound blocked, for when the inevitable happens. You think the South Korean 100 mbit connections are a pain in the arse for mail admins? What 'til this becomes the norm.

Re:the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

POS interfaces are symmetric.

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:"Mamma's CRS"#sh interfaces pOS 0/3/0/0
POS0/3/0/0 is up, line protocol is up
  Interface state transitions: 598
  Hardware is Packet over SONET/SDH
  Internet address is x.x.x.x/30
  MTU 4474 bytes, BW 39813120 Kbit
    reliability 255/255, txload 0/255, rxload 0/255

Actually, it's called

[geekoid]

RTFA!

They were testing a new modulation techniques that make it cheaper. SO you won't need money to burn to get it.

Re:Actually, it's called

[Darth Cider]

The technique can send signals 2000 km over fiber without the need for transponders (repeaters) between sender and receiver. Now Google, for example, can create an alternate backbone from all that dark fiber it's been buying up, with near-zero maintenance costs.

Here's a diagram of the test network.

Every story needs photos

[jmilne]

There's some photos on Peter Lothberg's site that might be his mom playing with her new connection.

Re:Every story needs photos

[dosle]

Here's a link to the machinery behind the connection. /cry

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index.h tml

Re:Every story needs photos

[Anonymous Coward]

man, that sounds like a bad MILF joke. seriously, that's a huge "modem"

Re:Every story needs photos

[Anonymous Coward]

The site seems to be down. I think we can assume he isn't hosting the photos at his Grandmothers' place.

Yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but will it blend?

Forget that. The REAL question is...

[Moraelin]

Forget the technical side of it all. The real question is: can any _human_ watch 1500 movies simultaneously? :P

And at the risk of dragging it back into technology, that's assuming they give her a lot of TFTs too. Otherwise on a 1920x1200 pixel screen, we're talking 1536 pixels per movie window. Assuming they're tiled without borders, that's... hmm... closest I can get while keeping the 16/9 aspect ratio is 48 by 27 pixels per movie. Not gonna see much detail there, and that's putting it mildly :P

Re:Forget that. The REAL question is...

[multipartmixed]

> Not gonna see much detail there, and that's putting it mildly :P

Whoah! Check it out! All those flesh coloured blobs are dancing rhythmically!

Re:Forget that. The REAL question is...

[sxtxixtxcxh]

adding to what you're saying, if have enough bandwidth for one hdtv stream, you'd practically be able to do what you're saying - watch 1500 channels simultaneously on one hdtv screen.

no sense in wasting the bandwidth on pixels that won't ever be displayed.

Re:Forget that. The REAL question is...

[Moraelin]

True. In fact that's probably the most insightful thing I've seen in this topic.

Silly question

[Anonymous Coward]

Granting that she had the processing power at her fingertips to actually receive and display all that content realtime, why do people assume all 1.5k streams would have to come from the same place???

Re:Silly question

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Backbone. It all DOES come from the same place, eventually. Everything coming to you over the Internet is likely coming through one single giant pipe. Now imagine 2000 people with 40GB fiber trying to use one 20 TB backbone. Not everybody is going to get the full use of their 40GB.

Fiber to the home

[dokhebi]

Forget installing Fiber to the home in Europe. I want it in Burbank, CA! Not just to download, but to get clear telephone and TV service.

Who needs Copper? Give me Glass!

Just my $0.02 worth.

Re:Fiber to the home

[jbeaupre]

I don't think you'll get much fiber optic cable trading 2 copper pennies for it.

Re:Fiber to the home

[0racle]

Screw fiber. I can only get dial-up, T1 or Satellite where I live. I'd love to have any decent broadband option.

A use no one has thought of yet...

[Crazy Taco]

There are actually some uses of this connection that none of you are considering. Everyone sees the obvious "Watch TV, download movies," BUT does anyone here notice the potential for application developers? Currently a lot of us developers have moved to using the Internet for our applications, because it solves a lot of our deployment problems. However, the downside of Internet applications is that their performance is far inferior to that of desktop applications (both graphically and otherwise). We are currently hamstrung by our inability to quickly send information to a users PC. We end up using almost all our bandwidth to send down data, with a small amount to prettify the page a little, but this sort of bandwidth could allow us to run beautiful, full featured applications remotely, thus avoiding the distribution problems of standalone apps AND avoiding the current throttling problems Internet apps have currently.

Look at it this way... connection speeds like that would be for all intents and purposes just as fast as a hard drive is today, and you could treat them as such. Currently, when a computer runs an app, it pulls data/program off slow hard drive, puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. In the future, computer pulls data/program off network (at speeds as good as a hard drive), puts it in fast RAM or cache, and runs it from there. The possibilities are amazing!

Re:A use no one has thought of yet...

[jbeaupre]

All of which is still displayed on a screen. So now it's just a very interactive movie.

Re:I have this, but there's just one slight proble

[Havenwar]

hmm... seems the internet has expanded since then, I found links out of that page which redirected me elsewhere and I was back in it all again. This however, http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm is the proper end of the internet, as I was referred to by google reader.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this even remotely news? Some over-paid geek ran fiber to his mother's house and hooked it up with extremely expensive optical gear that's been on the market for about 3 years now.

She's never going to use more than about 30 Mbps, anyway.

Re:So what?

[Tempest451]

Because it begs the question that if some over-paid geek could get his mom this kind of bandwidth, why cant the rest of us get it? Get it?

Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion

[dgatwood]

I returned a consumer-grade Netgear gigabit switch and replaced it with a D-Link switch a few weeks ago because the Netgear switch was showing about 85% packet loss at 100 mbps speeds. Sadly, in my experience, Netgear just doesn't build them like they used to. Oh, and then there was the Netgear ethernet card that wouldn't start talking to the network if you disconnected and reconnected the cable. You had to shut the interface down and bring it back up. After a couple of years like that, it started dropping off the network on its own, and I tossed it and bought a D-Link card.

Considering what a small amount of networking gear I own, after getting burned twice by Netgear's crap, I've pretty much sworn off their products. They're now in my "don't buy" list alongside Linksys (whose switches wouldn't consistently talk to other switches upstream at my previous employer). I'd better stop swearing off networking product manufacturers pretty soon or I'm going to run out. :-)

Don't get me wrong.... D-Link is no picnic, either, but at least their hardware is solid. Had to rewrite the property list file to get their Mac OS X driver to load in 10.4, though. It shipped with an old disk and there wasn't a newer version of the software on their website as far as I could find. I wrote them and asked them to fix it. Not sure if they ever did... *sigh* ...but at least their hardware is solid. *grumbles*

Dumbest Question Ever

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?

Oh, come now. What drives EVERY technoligical advance? I'm thinking every slashdotter would have a copy of every pr0n movie ever made.

Re:Dumbest Question Ever

[TheRaven64]

I'm thinking every slashdotter would have a copy of every pr0n movie ever made. Why bother, when you have enough bandwidth to download whichever one you want in a fraction of a second?

Re:Dumbest Question Ever

[vecctor]

This reminds me of when napster first came out and college connections weren't swamped with p2p and also weren't restricting anything.

I had friends that didn't keep any music they downloaded. If they wanted to listen to something, they would queue it up, hit play, and when they were done with it, delete the file. Napster downloaded things in-order, so you could start listening before it had finished.

Re:Dumbest Question Ever

[zero_offset]

I knew people who did that, too.

In some sense, we might be headed that way again (although I'm too pessimistic to expect it to catch on) --
WB catalog free on imeem

The servers are going to be the next bottleneck

[schweini]

I know this was only a PR stunt, but it does show point out the trend that users are starting to get very decent bandwidths nowadays. My only worry is: how can the servers keep up? Most dedicated server i saw still 'only' have 100MBit pipes, and even at 1GBit, it only takes 100 simultaneous 10MBit connections (and only 10 for the 100MBit connections! Kneel before my math skills!) to saturate that link - so, what are servers supposed to do?
I'm really worried that this trend will complicate matters for people like me who manage normal servers, instead of akamai'd server farms....

Re:The servers are going to be the next bottleneck

[soleblaze]

Yes, but as a users bandwidth goes up, their connection times will go down. Unless your so popular that everyone is hitting your site at the exact same time, you shouldn't notice too much of a difference.

The little old lady from Pasadena...

[flyingfsck]

go lady, go lady, go lady, go - lady go...

Imagine how fast it would be on Linux.

This is what I would call a...

[Polarn]

...MILF!

Hmm...

[di0s]

If a Winders PC can be owned in under 2 minutes on a normal broadband connection (say 6Mbps), how long till her PC is owned? /me tries to come up with a formula

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I thought that was because bots pass their crap to random IP addresses, and if she's only got one, it would take approximately 2 minutes.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what made installing Windows so hard. The instant the machine did its first boot into Windows it was completely owned by virus/malware/adware and bots.

Re:Hmm...

[geekoid]

still 2 minutes....it's just owned by a lot more people.

What All Other ./ers Would Do...

[saudadelinux]

What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue? ...develop a truly horrible case of tennis elbow. Joking :)

Re:What All Other ./ers Would Do...

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's why my elbow hurts! I thought was swimming or squash... uhm... I better stop play squash.

Re:What All Other ./ers Would Do...

[lena_10326]

What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?

...develop a truly horrible case of tennis elbow. Joking :)

You would, but I wouldn't. Not joking. :D

Re:What All Other ./ers Would Do...

[dwater]

ah, that's a joke because of Wimbledon, right? ...though I thought it had just finished, so perhaps you're a little off.

I hope that it will be an affordable 40Gbps duplex

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish this was affordable for both 40Gbps upload speed and 40Gbps download speed because I'm tired of being limited to 75KB/s for upload. The artificial constraints on the upload are hugely frustrating and a particular waste of time for those who can't afford the high speed connections. I still know people using 56Kbps modems and that's actually a terrible state of affairs. I wish I could help these people but I'm cash-strapped myself.

Lust...

[drwhite]

is there such a thing as "binary drool?" 40Gbps...oh how much pr0n I could swim in!

I live in Karlstad

[lobStar]

Yes, it lives about 60 000 people in Karlstad. The municipal fibre net is really cool.

Actually, many cities are building such MAN:s to different extents. Usually they connect to several different WAN:s, like Telia, IP-Only and Sunet. Thereby the municipal company can resell IP transit though the "last mile" and the customer only buyes from the WAN providers.

The Catch

[jubei]

The catch is that it is still 128kbps upload.

Here we go again

[ch-chuck]

All these stories about some home user getting massive broadband only reminds me how Verizon never seem to be able to deliver my home much more than a string with a tin-can on the end. The current apartment was a 'maybe, we have to test' - after a week and a half the application was abruptly canceled w/o explaination, and folks further out in the country get dsl just fine. Bastards.

40Gbps down, still 384Kbps up...

[akpoff]

The article doesn't say that but while downloads speeds keep increasing I still long to have 1+ Mbps upload speeds with low latency. I have all the computing power I need at home but still find pay for an external web account because the link to my house would become saturated if anyone tried to view my vacation pics. It's just not the full-on internet I imagine when most users are downloaders only.

Re:40Gbps down, still 384Kbps up...

[marx]

It used to be like that where I live as well (Sweden), but about 1 year ago the ADSL providers started offering 8/8 Mbit (or 20/3) instead of 24/1 Mbit or something similar.

Re:40Gbps down, still 384Kbps up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck marked this as "troll". Agree with it or not, the OP is right, at least for many areas in the US. Download speeds are increasing while upload speeds are barely creeping upwards. All the residential offerings where I live max out at 768Kb/s for upload speeds. Most of the introductory offerings are on the order of 1.5Mb/s down and 128kb/s up. This assymetry fits very nicely with a view of the internet as a mere entertainment conduit. It hardly fits in with the model of every node as an equal peer.

Truer words may never have been written...

[Anonymous Coward]

"the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows "

Re:It's called OC-192 (almost)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost assuredly 4xOC-192 (or 4x10GE LAN PHY) over CWDM. That'd be the only "affordable" way to do it. Single OC-768 interfaces are ridiculously pricey.

Your mom is on the line again, Peter...

[Dekortage]

...she says the Microsoft Internet is down again even with that forty jiggle-bite thingy you installed.

Are you kidding?

[jon287]

The RIAA would claim damages equal to 40k years of the entire planets GDP. And thats just for "Sexy Back". Clearly mankinds greatest achievemnet.

Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion

[spacefight]

I had dropped connections with a netgear router years ago. Not packet loss, but long living TCP sessions such as SSH got dropped while running gnutella. Crippelware so to say.

Cost effective my ass

[Mr. Freeman]

How is one person with a fast Internet connection proof that fiber networks are cost effective?

Fine in theory, but...

[The13thMonkey]

Dear Mrs Sigbritt,

Our logs show that you have exceeded our 'fair use' limit of 6Gb per month in less than 0.1 seconds. As per our terms of service your contract will be cancelled with immediate effect and no refund will be given.

Yours,
An ISP

wanna bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think Peter is considering moving back into his mother's basement?

Two words

[jfekendall]

Optical Chipset

Eat a dick, Dave

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a stupid fascist asshole.

Personally...

[PolishPimpin]

Id put an addition to my house for a datacenter... Thats alot of bandwidth she has that is going to waste hooked up to 1 PC runnning windows... Why not do some hosting on a few hundred servers (all saying she has adaequete electricity and cooling installed)...

1500 HDTV Channels??

[tantaliz3]

Woot! Now every wall in my house can be an HDTV!

Why not me?

[slapout]

Wow. I almost cried. I just upgraded from dial-up to satellite and I still can't download a Linux ISO because of bandwidth caps.

Fiber?

[PapaSmurph]

One advantage of fiber-to-the-home is, everyone will be regular!

oohh nice

[Chutulu]

now Peter Löthberg, can go to his mommie house download all the pr0n he wants...

I reckon...

[garry_g]

... RIAA is already preparing the forty thousand claims against her pirating forty million songs ... after all, what would anybody do witha 40gig link other than pirate music.

In related news, MPAA has announced they already have their lawyers working on the legal papers to sue, too ...

Exactly. If I were the MAFIAA

[Travoltus]

I would lobby for 40gbps connections for everyone, and wifi based internet to reach even the remotest parts of the sticks. There would never be another CD, DVD or HD DVD put to press, EVER. You'd come to me for access rights to all music and all movies, and I'd charge by the minute.

I'd be CEO of Planet Earth in 5 years.

40 GigaBIT

[marx]

So it's 5 Gigabytes per second.

Envy is too strong a word, but...

[I Like Pudding]

I just wish my DSL would fucking stay connected.

Re:Envy is too strong a word, but...

[The MESMERIC]

same here.

Nerds!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off your computer and go by your local friendly fire station. And yes you should actually go there physically and examine the end of a fire hose.

Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion

[Shotgun]

Configure anything to auto and it will choose 10MB/half-duplex. Auto-configuration on ethernet is an ugly, stop-gap of a hack of the 10MB standard that has never worked...could never work...reliably. The inability to renegotiate is the problem.

Comcast - disconnecting your service

[BrookHarty]

Many people at work have comcast, a few had comcast security call them for excessive usage. Seems, even though you buy the 12meg/768 service, you can really use it too much.

With multiple people (large family), xbox 360 services, downloading movies off itunes, work vpn, etc, you could use too much bandwidth for their services, and such people are being told dont use it too much or we will shut if off without notice.

Really a scam, they get you hooked with cheap combo package of tv/phone/internet then you use too much of it? Seems they should be limiting it if they have an issue, it shouldnt be the consumers to monitor, they are not given the tools, they dont have bandwidth usage reports.

Really, comcast is sleazy in its high speed internet usage policies.

Re:Yes, but the **real** qustion

[Stu Charlton]

I'm saddened by this. Both D-Link and Linksys have my scorn, but I've had good experiences with Netgear.

Apple has been mildly redeemed with the new Airport Extreme 802.11n Base Station (AEBS), which has been a champ. This after the horrible, horrible, take-2-years-to-patch-it-right Airport Extreme 802.11g. Though even they screwed up the new AEBS where one couldn't use VPN with the new AEBS until the first patch.

What Many Other ./ers Could Do...

[Anonymous Coward]

...develop a truly horrible case of tennis elbow. Joking :) ...is develop a spirit for superfluous disclaimers because of the increasing loss of privacy (or appearance thereof). Not joking. :(

40GB/s of nothing to watch

[Ancient_Hacker]

I imagine she can't hit that many keys per second, so the data must be incoming not outgoing. And since there are maybe ten movies a year worth watching, maybe 60GB of data her connection is going to be running full tilt for about a second a year.

Maybe this is a bit if a waste?

Maybe not for a network expert

[Sycraft-fu]

But form the pictures on his site, it's a Cisco CRS router that they used for it. No surprise, that's the class of hardware you need for that kind of speed. Well those are not exactly the kind of thing you just take out of the box, plug in and have it run. Takes more than a bit of setup and configuration to make one work. Yes for a Cisco guy it might be easier, especially if they are a Linux user, but for your average user IOS-XR is about as clear as mud.

Pity that we can't have this here in the US.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading here, I think, about the pitiful US broadband speeds we get whereas other countries like Japan, Korea and some countries in Europe have triple or more broadband speeds than we do. It is strange that in a country where we tout many advances in technology we still have average speed of about 4Mb/s broadband speeds that is akin to horse and buggy in the world of cars where in Japan they have average speed around 61Mb/s. I have an Japanese co-worker that travels back to Japan occasionally and he tell me the lack of options and speed we have in the US for broadband connections.
I can't tell what is holding us up in speed of our connections; corporate management which worries about ROI or government which worries about giving the people too much access to the world but we, in US, need to get our collective rears together and get our network and broadband speeds up to the rest of the world.

What I want to know is ....

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Libraries of Congress can she download in 1 unit time.

I mean come on - measurement standards are meant to be used!!

It's not broadband

[acoustix]

It's actually called baseband, but don't let the facts get in the way.

Nick

Apparently?

[Hercules Peanut]

Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'" You could have tacked that statement onto the end of nearly every slashdot article submitted over the past 10 years.

One word:

[geekoid]

Matlock

Why the cynicism?

[Stu Charlton]

So, the real point is NOT that this is for a single household, but rather that you drastically reduce the number of intermediaries required for a network point of presence. This drastically reduces the cost of fibre-to-the-home. The last mile problem really isn't one in urban centres -- there is plenty of fibre to go around, but not enough money to make the transmission of content worthwhile.

And , yes, the article is a not-so-subtle advertisement for the Cisco CRS-1 routing system. Hopefully others will follow with this kind of model...

Upload

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope she uploads to me!

Explanation re Windows install

[funkdancer]

4.5/5 (points deducted for lying about needing to install Windows on a newly purchased PC[1])

The hardware geek in me tells me that

1) he took the opportunity to upgrade his own computer (which might have had some Linux flavour on it), and installed Windows on the old.

2) he bought the computer as parts. This is probably most plausible. In the past 15 years I haven't bought a computer that wasn't a laptop that I didn't specify and put together myself, from parts.

...and when data can be supplied at that rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... Doesn't the bandwidth on the server's side have something to do with download speeds?

yes but...

[Kildjean]

I bet you could play a mean Quake in that bandwidth ;)

Oblig Reply

[drachenstern]

Why Google(tm), but of course.

Silly little A/C . . . Say, you must be new here, huh?

A/C's never seem to know how to register. Here's a hint, the link to register is at the top of the page.

Love the idea, the reality...

[TheDreadedGMan]

.. Leaves something to be desired.

List of computer components (speeds per second):

• DDR2/533 memory (max theory) - 68Gbits, 8.5GB Random Memory speed chart
• 75 yr old woman's BB - 40Gbits, 5GB
• ATA-133 Interface - 1064Mbits - 133MB
• Gigabit Ethernet - 1000Mbits - 125MB
• USB 2.0 - 480Mbits - 60MB
• Avg. 7200 RPM HDD - 320Mbits - 40MB
• "Fast" Ethernet - 100Mbits - 12.5MB
• "Slow" Ethernet - 10Mbits - 1.25MB
• My DSL - 4Mbits - 500KB
• 56K Modem - 56Kbits - 7KB
• 300 Baud Modem - 300 bits - 37.5 bytes
• Very Fast typist - 80 bits - 10 bytes (120 5-letter words per minute)

Windows install?

[the_womble]

the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC

Windows will not be ready for the desktop until your grandmother can install it.

Ok, how long...

[laejoh]

will it take before there's an article reading A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden is sued by the RIAA for massive copyright infringment.

Re: A nice home for the Pirate's Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

I am joking.

I would take it but

[poullos]

Since these speeds are for more than enough, why not invest in something that makes Sahara desert to a rain forest instead? At least this will be in need in the coming years the way I see it... *proud owner of 1mb connection* 3

Only on slashdot...

[bogd]

...would such a commentary get moderated "+5, Informative"!

[Or '+5, Interesting', as it seems to have changed while I was writing this :P ]

PCIe units were in bytes not bits

[Sits]

PCIe does *theoretical* maximum of 8GBytes/s according to Wikipedia. 8 bits in a byte so 8*8 = 64Gbits/s and 64Gbits > 40Gbits mentioned in the article. Watch out on those units - case matters!

(However if you check the Wikipedia list of computer bus bandwidths is says that x16 PCIe 1.0 can only reach 40Gbit/s. I think this is because the encoding overhead has been taken into account).

"Bandwidth's Not An Issue" has happened before

[billstewart]

Scaling issues are always changing - some components get faster, so others become the bottleneck, then they get faster. A decade or so ago I was beta-testing DSL, with a 384kbps SDSL connection at home (too far from the telco for 768) and a 1.1 Mbps in my lab. Most of the web back then was either on smaller web servers that had T1 lines or larger servers with T3 access but lots of clients connected to them. I never could saturate the lab connection; the home connection was faster than most web servers out there, but if I downloaded a really large file such as a Netscape distribution I could keep things running long enough for TCP Slowstart to ramp up to fill my 384kbps before the download is over. But otherwise it was difficult to fill up the 384, other than by starting a lot of downloads at once, and TCP Slowstart had a lot to do with that.

BitTorrent has changed the relationships a bit, but servers in general are a lot faster - not only is there larger content available, and more of it, but most servers are in data centers where they have fast shared Ethernet pipes, and they have faster disks and lots of their content cached in RAM, so their shared disk performance can outrun my (1.5Mbps) DSL, even if it can't outrun my disks. There's larger content available - my DSL is faster, but files are *much* larger, with single-CD Linux distros being a rarity and 100 MB video podcasts being common, so TCP Slowstart no longer throttles my average download speeds. And BitTorrent means that if I want popular Linux distros or jam band FLACs, server performance is no longer a bottleneck (especially for recently released distros, since popularity means more people uploading their side of the connection.)

That's reinventing Radio and TV

[billstewart]

"Not storing content" means "stuck with television". Boring. It's been done, and it won't make you CEO of Plant Earth, because Rupert Murdoch is already in line ahead of you, using it to reinvent politics as well as lowest-common-denominator TV. And people will still get Tivo, even if you've got Video-On-Demand. And they'll share their bookmark files for TV programs, and you'll need to start harassing them for providing content recommendations without paying licenses.

"Not storing content" also means "diskless workstations", but everybody usually decides those are boring also and puts disk drives on their workstations. (Of course, a major reason for that is laptops and portability - the last time I worked in a Real Office on a software development project, it was quite nice to have a diskless workstation on my desk, because it was dead silent, and as the system administrator I'd made sure we had enough disk space on the server up in the lab.)

(In Soviet Russia, Television Reinvents You!)

INDUCE

[Travoltus]

Hard drives induce piracy. They're also able to be encrypted. That makes them also a potential weapon of mass destruction. I'd make sure all hard drives require special permits and stuff. I'd pass the INDUCE Act the way they passed the USAPATRIOT Act: behind closed doors.

Failing that, the next time a plane crashes I'd play my trump card - plant a hard drive at the crash site and say it was used to bring it down.

No, really. Ever seen a hard drive fired out at high speed? It can do some serious damage!

(facetiousness mode off)