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.
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.
RTFA!
They were testing a new modulation techniques that make it cheaper. SO you won't need money to burn to get it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's some photos on Peter Lothberg's site that might be his mom playing with her new connection.
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!