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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.
Talk about taking a drink from a firehose... How's her NIC keep up with that throughput? How's her hard drive? Her CPU?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
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.
What would you do if bandwidth were suddenly not an issue?
Get rid of all of these hard drives.
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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.