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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.
That's gotta be the most insightful thing I've seen posted in a comment on Slashdot -- EVAR.
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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.
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.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1